


Lost In The Echo

by boxparade



Series: Until The Night Is Dawn [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Children, Developing Relationship, F/F, F/M, Family, Grief/Mourning, Internalized Homophobia, Kid Fic, M/M, PTSD, Parent Death, Remix, Superfamily, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-16
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2017-11-10 03:03:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 39
Words: 39,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/461520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxparade/pseuds/boxparade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>An explosion originating in Avengers tower turns out to be much more than just an explosion. The appearance of a group of mysterious children has the Avengers torn amongst themselves, and the children seem to know a lot more than they're saying. When two universes collide, both the Avengers and the mysterious group of kids must deal with the fallout before it tears them—and their world—apart.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Children of Lantean Design](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/9755) by Xela. 



> Where do I even start?
> 
> 1\. The premise for this story belongs entirely to Xela, the author of the SGA work that inspired this one. You don't need to read that story to understand anything in this one, but I'd recommend reading it anyway, as it's a wonderful story.
> 
> 2\. All the kids (excepting Peter Parker) are original characters, and thus belong to me. Everyone/everything else is the property of/copyrighted to their respective franchises.
> 
> 3\. In the first few chapters, I jump between a lot of character's heads, but as the story progresses, I stick with one character for the entire scene. So if the style bothers you, just keep reading and it should settle down. (It bothered me, too.)
> 
> 4\. Chapters are ridiculously short, but there are a lot of them.
> 
> 5\. FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE:
>
>> Peter (16) *  
> Mara (15)  
> Sammy (14)  
> Claire (12)  
> Nari (10)  
> Magni "Mac" (8) †  
> Kennedy (6) *  
> Amy (3) -  
> Zeke (3) -  
> Modi "Mo" (2) †  
> —  
> *, †, - = siblings
> 
>   
> —  
> 6\. Forgive my characterization with Peter. I wrote most of this before I'd seen the movie and realized he was so...cheeky. You'll notice a shift in the way I write him, which is after I'd seen the movie. I'm claiming creative license!
> 
> 7\. The full [Family Tree](http://archiveofourown.org/works/639914) is here. BE AWARE THAT THIS MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS.
> 
> 8\. I'll add more (oh god, as if there aren't enough) notes as I get through the story.  
>  
> 
> *** WARNINGS *** at the end of the work. (Nothing major, I don't think.)
> 
> : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :   
> : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :   
> : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 
> 
> UPDATE: August 18, 2016
> 
> I am seriously considering a rewrite.
> 
> It's been 4 years since I first posted this. A lot has happened in those years, with both my writing and the MCU. I don't ship half the pairings in this fic anymore. Most of my current work is firmly limited to one POV for the entire story, which I prefer. Despite the fact that this is an AU, I feel like this story has been thoroughly jossed with the Bucky/Winter Soldier plotline.
> 
> That being said, I have an attachment to the characters and story I've created here. I want to finish this fic. I've known since its inception how I want it to end. But I don't think I can get there with the fic as it stands, unless I sacrificed certain qualities of my writing in order to bang out the rest, or completely ignore everything I've written up to this point; essentially cleaving the fic in two.
> 
> Nothing is going to happen immediately, though. I've got far too many real-life concerns to take on a project of this size at the moment. But if all goes well over the next couple months, I *will* have time to give this the rewrite it deserves, and may take this down in the meantime.
> 
> Fair warning, a rewrite would consist of:
> 
> 1\. Overhauling the POV problems. I'd consider switching between a handful of characters, but more than likely I'll pick one and commit. Probably Tony, because he's my bae.
> 
> 2\. Changing or eliminating some of the pairings. Nat/Pep probably won't happen. I kinda feel like I was off my rocker when I decided that in the first place. I'm still debating on what I want to do about Coulson.
> 
> As for the Steve/Tony pairing, I still ship it, but I've added Steve/Bucky to my repertoire since then, and Steve/Tony/Bucky is a possibility as well. Regardless, I feel like I can't ignore Bucky in a rewrite. If anyone wants to weigh in, maybe give me some ideas, hmu in the comments.
> 
> 3\. Less focus on some of the kids. Peter will be forefront, I love Kennedy to pieces, and Claire and Sammy will likely still play significant roles. I feel like I can foist Mac and Mo on Thor/Jane and be done with it. Especially considering POV limitations, this makes a lot of sense to me. I want to see Bucky and a kid so badly.
> 
> 4\. Peter/Wade is never gonna happen, not even in the codas. Not after I saw Deadpool. Wade in those movies was too perfect for words, and I couldn't stick him with Peter if I tried. Maybe some authors can, but I can't and I don't want to.
> 
>  
> 
> If any of that seems like something you might not want to read, I'd suggest saving this version of the fic if you want to be able to read it later.
> 
> Other than that, I'm open to suggestions or questions or concrit or whatever you wanna throw at me. Like I said, nothing is happening right this very moment. I'm still thinking of ideas. Tell me what you wanna see and maybe it'll inspire me in the right direction. :)
> 
> Thanks for putting up with all my shit,
> 
> Jessa

The sky is raining doombot slugs from an alternate universe, Tony’s suit is (impossibly) falling apart, Loki decided to pop by for a visit and hijack all the world domination fun, and the Avengers have racked up enough in damages to feed a small country for a century.

Must be a Tuesday.

“Left flight stabilizer down, sir,” JARVIS informs him, and Tony bites his cheek to keep from snapping that he knows. The last time he’d snapped at JARVIS in the middle of a fight, he got home only to discover that his bathrooms would only provide him with cold water, and it was only when he, specifically, was using that bathroom. That’s the last time Tony designs an AI with an attitude.

He fires a couple repulsor blasts at some relatively smaller doombots, and flies another two into each other. The bots are ridiculously easy to destroy—Hulk took out fifty in the minute after Cap told him to smash—but it’s the sheer number that are making this less than an in-and-out fight.

That, and they now have to deal with Loki trying to add to the chaos, though Thor is (mostly) dealing with it. The last Tony checked, they were having some sort of hug-fight. He’s learned to stop questioning Asgardian ways, specifically when it comes to Thor and Loki. Besides, even if Loki kills a hundred people every time he’s feeling a little bit unloved, compared to the other supervillains, he’s like a kitten. An angry kitten obsessed with being equal to Thor in his (now dead) father’s eyes, but a kitten nonetheless.

“Iron Man, behind you!” Clint’s voice cuts in through the com, and Tony spins just in time to catch the bot flying at him with razors sticking out of it, ripping out a cable that looked important and chucking the thing toward the ground.

“Nice catch,” Hawkeye says, smirking down at the tiny fleck that is Tony.

“I aim to please, Barton,” Tony’s voice shoots back, all his bravado still firmly in place, even when they’ve been fighting these things for awhile now. They just won’t stop coming. Even Clint’s bow arm is starting to tire, and the last time that happened was in Budapest, and he hadn’t been fighting at all. Though he supposed Tash would probably beg to differ on that particular point.

He thinks they’re close to finishing this up, but that’s when the king of all the doombot slug things comes crawling out of a portal, dripping in some sort of acidic slime that melts right through concrete and steel. “Shit,” Clint says, mostly to himself, and starts firing arrows at the thing in time with Iron Man’s repulsor blasts.

“It’s not—” Tony starts, and then cuts out, and even JARVIS doesn’t know what caused the comms to go out.

Which is about the time Loki pops in out of nowhere, does some weird magic spell with his staff, and then swings it like a baseball bat to knock Tony out of the sky. His jets spark out because damn it, technology always gets weird around magic, despite Thor’s firm belief that it’s just a different kind of science.

He’s spinning through the sky at an angle, headed straight for one of the portals the slugs are coming through, and he has just enough time to think _not again_ before there’s a searing pain ripping through his chest like a fucking flash fire, and everything goes black to the sound of JARVIS informing him (in a dying, distorted voice) that his arc reactor just blinked out.


	2. Chapter 2

“Peter,” Claire warns over the comms as she steals another look around the corner. Before she can pull back, there’s something whizzing by her head, and she yelps and flattens herself back against the wall. A part of her hair is singed, but that’s hardly the worst thing that could happen right now. _“Peter,”_ she tries again, keeping her voice quiet as if the _tinea_ won’t know where she is.

The comm crackles and then Peter says “I’m trying! We need more time.”

He doesn’t listen to whatever Claire says in response, just leans down and says “C’mon, Blue,” with a steady hand on her shoulder. She looks up at him with those familiar blue eyes, responding *Soon*, and then turns back to watch what her hands are doing before she accidentally blows something up. She wishes, not for the first time, that her hands weren’t so small. While it’s helpful in precise wire work and especially miniature reactor tech, she can’t hold the metal plates together _and_ get the core processor spinning at the same time.

Frustrated, and running out of time, she releases the plates again and reaches back without looking to grab her brother’s hand, tugging him forward and putting his hand right over the plates. *Hold,* she orders with a quick flick of her wrist, and he fumbles a bit, but gets with the program. She uses both her hands to spin the core, slow but steady, and thinks again that this would be over and done with by now if she were older. A six-year-old was never meant to launch a room-sized reactor engine by herself, but then the world hadn’t anticipated Kennedy, had they?

Finally, the core starts spinning on its own, and in another heart-stopping moment, the entire room is filled with the blue glow from the vibranium ring, and Kennedy turns to her brother, his eyes impossibly wide and reflecting the light of their last hope, and nods.

Immediately, Peter withdraws his hand from the machine and looks at it like it bit him. He covers his eyes for a second, breathing out a sigh of relief, and then immediately snaps his hand to his comm and yells “We’re a go. Get over here _now,_ everyone.”

“That might be a problem,” Sammy shoots back, herding the rest of their group behind him as he faces a trio of _tinea_ , wings skeletal-like and vibrating at their backs. They’re making a series of clicking noises that Sammy figures is some form of communication, but they’re not trying to kill them with acid bullets yet.

He runs through the blueprints of the tower in his mind, trying to think if there’s an alternate route to home base, but he knows there isn’t. The comms are weaker on this side of the building, so Sammy doesn’t know if Peter, Claire, or Mara managed to respond to him, but it’s not like they’d be able to help, anyway.

He’s about one second away from telling the kids to run past while he poses as a distraction when suddenly someone breaks ranks, and Sammy is reaching forward, trying to grab Amy, to stop her, but he nearly falls forward when Zeke rushes past on his other side, looking back at him with the fiercest determination he’s ever seen in a three-year-old.

Zeke grabs his sister’s hand as she yells “Go ‘way, stupid-head!” His fingers and toes get that tingly feeling, like sometimes when he falls asleep watching movies, and then Amy is glowing and he is, too. It’s warm, and it feels like Daddy when he goes big, and cuddles them, and then everything goes _boom_ and Zeke goes to the place where dreams live.

“Sammy?” Claire shrieks over the comm, and she’s running, jumping over pieces of rubble and darting past knocked-out _tinea_ , melting into the ground like bubbling pits of black tar. “Sammy, come in,” she says a bit more calmly, rounding the corner and meeting Mara’s eyes, dark and wide and not nearly as scared as she feels.

Mara grabs Claire’s hand, dragging her along behind, because Claire has a tendency to get a bit hysterical, just like her mother. Mara tries to keep her breathing steady, focusing on getting to their goal destination before she starts to concern herself with the others. They were informed of the risks before they all split up. If they can’t make it back to home base on their own, then there’s no time to panic. From what Peter said Kennedy had said, the thing that was going to get them out of here would only run so long.

Mara gripped Claire’s arm a little tighter, and picked up the pace.


	3. Chapter 3

“Iron Man,” Steve yells through the comm, for the third time. He sends his shield flying through a line of robotic slugs, or whatever these things are, and just as he catches it, Hawkeye’s voice comes in.

“He fell when Loki sent that EMP thing out,” Clint says, keeping his eyes focused on the portal Tony fell into. He shoots an arrow behind himself, sending a doom-slug clattering to the rooftop he’s perched on, and looks down into the swirling mass of red and black. It looks vaguely like a pool of oil, reflective and slippery, except it’s tilted on an angle that no puddle should be, and Tony just fell into it and didn’t come out the other side.

“Where’s Loki?” Steve asks, choosing to ignore the whereabouts of Iron Man for the time being, because from the sound of Hawkeye’s voice, he doesn’t know where Iron Man is, or if there’s anything they can do. Steve has a team to worry about, first and foremost.

“I have spoken with my brother, and he shall no longer partake in this Midgardian villainy,” Thor proclaims, and Steve cautiously tries to weigh Thor’s words.

“Thor?” He prompts, because the last time they thought he had detained Loki, it…hadn’t exactly been the case.

“He will not bother you any longer, fair Captain,” Thor says, quietly—if Thor can ever be considered quiet.

Steve decides to take his word, and is about to ask Hawkeye if he has a visual on Black Widow or Hulk, but moments later, the ground starts rumbling beneath Steve, and a bright, bluish light comes rushing at them like a tidal wave, knocking Steve halfway into a building, and completely filling the city with a high-pitched, metallic hum, and light.


	4. Chapter 4

Tony comes to gasping for air and clutching at his chest, feeling the familiar needle-sharp pain piercing his heart, and breathes until it stops being so unbearably painful. The reactor must’ve gone out again, damn it. He would design another, stronger version (that works even when the air is filled with Asgardian magic), but where’s his time when some new big bad wolf sets out to destroy New York every damn week?

He’s no longer in the suit, which is weird because—as far as he can tell—he never told JARVIS to start removal protocols before he hit the ground. He’s pretty sure he intended to hit the ground in the suit, and then hopefully not die while inside it, and then…well, he hadn’t gotten that far in the plan.

“Oh, good,” a girl’s voice says, “He’s alive.”

Tony snaps open his eyes and is immediately confronted with a pair of bright, bright blue eyes staring down at him curiously. His brain clicks in just in time for him to piece together that the eyes belong to a child, staring down at him blankly, flanked by two older children that are standing. The small one has one of her hands _inside Tony’s chest._

Tony scatters back so fast that the girl winces when her hand is yanked from the gaping hole in Tony’s chest. Tony doesn’t even think beyond _reactor, reactor, reactor, where is it?_ because he can feel the strain on his heart, practically feel the shrapnel inching into his aorta, and he needs his reactor now now now now—

“Blue,” the older boy says, like a command, and in a second the small girl with the blue eyes is tossing something to him—something cylindrical and metal with a shining blue light and—and before Tony can so much as say “Gimme”, the boy is launching forward and jamming the reactor into his chest. Tony feels the pinching needles around his heart finally settle, and he starts to breathe again.

“Wha—” is the most Tony gets out before Natasha comes bounding in, still scuffed from the battle that is apparently no longer happening right over Tony’s head, and the same girl who spoke before turns, starts to say “Tash—” and then snaps her mouth shut, her eyes widening in fear.

Natasha takes stock of the situation: Tony is on the floor, looking wrecked, hand placed protectively over the reactor. Over him stand three unidentified, possible threats, one of them no older than six, and the boy standing so close to Tony that Natasha doesn’t even have to think before moving.

With a single hit to the back of the head, she knocks the eldest boy out cold and swirls fast enough to grab the two girls by their hair—a tactical decision made when neither of the girls moved to counter-strike when she hit the boy—and drag them to the bathroom on the side wall.

She expects the girls to stop being shell-shocked soon, and to start fighting back against their captivity, so she pulls a sharp, metal pipe from a chunk of concrete, and jabs the thing through the bottom of the door on an angle, nailing it into the wooden floor, and “Jesus wept, that’s hot.”

Natasha turns fiery eyes on him, just briefly, before she regains her cool and asks “And why is it that I have to be rescuing your ass again, Stark?”

“Don’t lie, you love it,” Tony deflects, and manages to get himself to his feet. He brushes the dust from his hands and runs one through his hair, and then looks down at the unconscious boy on the ground beside him. “A little harsh, don’t you think?”

“No,” is all Natasha says, before she swiftly steps over chunks of concrete and what looks like a toaster, toward Tony. She crouches down to examine the boy, and Tony looks a bit closer himself. He can’t be more than seventeen, and he hardly looks dangerous, even if he is a little rough around the edges—more so than the typical teenager, at least. The last time Tony checked. Maybe the trend now was for kids to go and get into fights and look like they’d spent a year in a war zone, because those clothes—ugh.

“They’re just kids, Tash,” Tony says quietly, confused in his own right. Sure, he’d been a little freaked, suddenly reviving with three small, strange children over him—very Children of the Corn, it was scary—but he can’t imagine a few kids posing a significant threat to them. Especially when the one Natasha karate-chopped just saved his life.

“Then how did they get in here?” Natasha asks sharply, looking up at Tony with eyes that say she’s still in full fighting mode.

“In case you haven’t noticed, that wall” Tony points to where the floor-to-ceiling windows had been, “is no longer a wall. In fact, I’d go so far to say it is a gash in the side of my lovely tower, which, really, you’d think the super villains would get bored and stop trying to smash it, because we have enough problems with the big green guy as it is, and—”

“It wasn’t the doombots, Stark,” Natasha says cooly, but there’s a deadly undertone to her voice that stops Tony from ranting and gives him the chills. “It wasn’t Loki, either. The fight is on the other side of the city.”

Tony frowns, wondering how the hell he wound up in Stark Tower in the first place (or how Natasha got over here so quickly), considering the last thing he remembered was falling from the sky after Loki blasted him with magic’s equivalent of an EMP. Honestly, if Thor wouldn’t smash his hammer into Tony’s skull, he would just have Loki accidentally killed by his own evil or contained like all the other super villains. But everyone sane is at least a little bit scared of Thor, and he loves his stupid, evil brother, and seems to think everything can be solved with hugs. And poptarts. He’s really got a thing for poptarts.

“Well maybe one of the bots made it over here and decided to take a bite from my tower?” Tony tries, running through calculations in his head. With the speed the bots traveled, and the likelihood of one of them getting past their defenses, and even adding an hour or two for when he was out and—it still isn’t adding up. “Or maybe there’s a completely unrelated super villain trying to destroy this part of the city,” he offers, but Natasha just raises an eyebrow at him. He’s about to start fighting her again (which is dangerous and he knows it) but she cuts him off by saying simply,

“This is the seventeenth floor.”

Tony snaps his jaw shut, thinks for a moment, and then nods solemnly at Natasha with a sparing glance for the door in which they locked the other two in. It’s still intact, and neither of the girls seem to be making a fuss—not that anyone would, after seeing Natasha go kung-fu on their companion and then shove a metal pipe straight through two layers of solid wood.

He doesn’t stop Natasha from calling over the comms for the others, saying “Avengers, we have a situation back at Stark Tower. Finish up there as soon as possible, we may need you here.”

He can hear the tinny sound of voices coming from Natasha’s comm—he has no idea where his went, though he assumes it’s somewhere in the rubble, along with his suit—and he walks to survey the damage to the tower while Natasha tries to go into greater detail about the situation without giving too much away, in case anyone was listening in. No matter how many times Tony tells her that he personally designed the comm system and that it’s impossible for it to be hijacked, intercepted, or overheard in any way, her training is a hard habit to break.

He leaves her to it, sticking his hands in his pockets as he tries to navigate through the rubble. It’s not nearly as devastated as some of the times the Hulk has come out to play, but he can’t piece together exactly _what_ caused all the damage, because it doesn’t look like a simple ‘HULK ANGRY, HULK SMASH’ thing, or like a ‘Loki has daddy issues and throws temper tantrums’ or even a ‘Pepper finally snapped and took her pent-up rage out on Tony’s possessions’ thing.

It’s a few minutes later when the equations running in the back of his mind finally reach endpoints that should be _impossible,_ because the ruins surrounding him aren’t nearly enough to reconstruct the walls and floor and cabinets and furniture, and with the way the universe works, matter doesn’t just up and disappear, unless there’s something of equal value to—

Shit.

“Natasha!” He shouts, rounding the corner with much less caution about his footing than before, “Tash, we have a problem,” he says, only to spot Natasha as she whips a couple of knives in the general direction of the kitchen.

“I’d noticed,” she says calmly, but with an edge to her voice, and Tony speeds up to get an angle on the doorway just as Natasha whips something else sharp and fast at—

“Down!” Sammy commands, handing the unconscious Zeke off to Nari, and spreading himself out as wide as he can in front of the kids as another knife whips past them. He tries not to look at his attacker, but considering the situation, it’s hard not to. What he can’t figure out is why Natasha missed, because Natasha doesn’t miss. She’s not like Clint, but that doesn’t explain why the last two—now three—knives have missed any of them, unless she’s somehow hesitant.

Sammy looks over to Mara, searching her for some sort of answer as to a way out of this, because they’re trapped in the kitchen and one of the deadliest assassins they know is trying to kill them. Mara narrows her eyes, coming to some sort of a decision, and then just gets up and starts walking toward Natasha, a blank, stone-cold look on her features.

She steels herself, looking Romanov straight in the eye, and without blinking, says “Please stop throwing knives at us.”

Romanov does stop then, but only because Stark ends up stepping between Mara and Romanov, saying something to the agent that Mara can’t hear. Romanov shakes her head, minutely, and glances back toward Mara with sharp, distrustful eyes. Mara honestly doesn’t blame her; their situation right now is particularly rare, and judging by the way they’ve been treated by Stark and Romanov thus far, it’s just as rare, if not more so, here. Wherever ‘here’ is.

Stark says something else then, and there’s a flash of anger in Romanov’s eyes, and then she notably jerks her head to a sound Mara can’t hear—like she’s also wearing a comm—and mouths something behind her hand, not looking at Stark.

Stark looks over at them, his eyes just as wary as Romanov’s, but particularly less deadly. He sizes Mara up. Mara stands stock still, hardly registering that she knows what Stark is doing, and then he seems to relax just a bit in the shoulders before giving Mara a slight nod.

Mara raises one eyebrow, a silent question of Stark’s certainty, but ultimately decides that showing these people a sign of trust might make them less inclined to kill them. Mara turns back to Sammy, who is looking out from the kitchen, still protectively huddling around the younger kids, and gives a curt nod.

Sammy turns back to the kids, and with just a gesture of his hands, slowly leads them just outside the doorway of the kitchen, in the open expanse of the larger room. Natasha flicks calculated, predatory eyes in their direction, but Sammy holds his ground and sets his jaw. It’s strange for all of them, he imagines, seeing…these people. Like this. Younger, and slightly different, and without a clue who any of them are. Sammy doesn’t know whether to be grateful or worried that he hasn’t encountered this alternate version of—

He shuts his eyes tight against the memory, blocking it out, because now is not the time for flashbacks or sorrow, and with a shake of his head, he opens his eyes back up just as something large and green comes swinging up from the side of the building, right through the gaping hole in what was once beautiful, floor-to-ceiling window panes. With an unsteady rumble that has all of them grabbing for something to stabilize themselves, the Hulk crashes down onto the rubble-littered floor, blinking at the unexpected group of children standing across the room.

And then—in a moment that stops all of their hearts, collectively—Amy toddles over the unsteady floor, crashes into the Hulk’s leg, and giggles when she says “Pai!”


	5. Chapter 5

Bruce thought his life was strange already. What, with accidentally turning into a giant, green monster whenever he was angry, and spending a good few years of his life running from the government, he thought he’d used up his quota of “strange” for pretty much the rest of his life.

But then he comes to in what looks like the ruins of the penthouse suite in Stark Tower. Tony, Natasha, Clint, Steve, and Thor are all staring down at him, wide-eyed, none of them saying anything. Bruce takes a deep breath, runs a hand down over his features, pointedly does _not_ think about whether or not his pants managed to stay on, and asks “What did I do?”

It’s Tony who answers first, and it’s not even with words—all he has to do is swallow, and glance downward, and at first Bruce thinks it’s because he’s lost his pants, which is hardly rare for him, but then he sees the tattered things sort of draped around his waist, and he frowns.

And then there’s some sort of movement against his leg, and he pushes himself up on his elbows to get a better look, and—

“Oh, lord,” Bruce says, eyes widening at the sleeping toddler curled up against his leg. She looks like she’s been crying, her whole face red, with little streams down her cheeks where the dust and dirt washed away and—why is there a toddler here? It’s hardly safe for her, they’re in a building that could collapse at any minute, not to mention this little girl is currently clinging to him, which is just a bad idea, a really bad idea, because he can already hear his heartbeat racing, and even though he _knows_ that he only hulks out when he’s actually angry—ever since Stark helped him out with that serum thing—he can’t help but feel residual fear creeping in.

Also, there’s a _toddler_.

“What? How? Why?” is all he manages to squeak out, and when he looks up at his teammates, they all seem to be just as lost as him.

Steve sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face, and says “Come on. We’re heading down to a safer floor, because while Stark _assures_ me that the tower’s structural integrity is beyond sound, I’d still rather not be at the epicenter if it does.”

The team starts to disperse, and Bruce makes to move with them, only there’s a warm weight on his leg and what the hell is he supposed to do about this?

Clint, still lingering behind, says softly “She wouldn’t let go. We were afraid of hurting her.” He shrugs one shoulder, chewing on the inside of his cheek as he carefully eyes the little girl. Bruce can’t tell if it’s wariness or confusion that dominates his features. “Just carry her. There’s a holding cell a few floors down where we put the others.”

Bruce gathers up the little girl, shaking because he’s so terrified he’ll hurt her, and then starts following Clint toward the stairwell. Then, something clicks.

“Wait, there are _more?”_


	6. Chapter 6

“You can’t just put them in a _cage,_ they’re kids!” Tony argues, and he’s not quite sure when he became the spokesperson for a bunch of kids he doesn’t know when the rest of the ream seems perfectly fine with imprisoning them. He doesn’t even _like_ kids, and he thinks the majority of them would probably do well to spend some time in a cage, but he can’t get rid of this horrible sympathy he’s got for the tiny humans. He thinks it’s probably because one (or more) of them saved his life. Damn it.

Thor chimes in (loudly, much too loudly) “I agree with the Man of Iron. Midgardian young are weak, and must be protected!”

“Thank you,” Tony says, exasperated, but is quickly overpowered by Captain Panties-in-a-Twist.

“Stark, we don’t know these children. They could be threats.” He stares at Tony with a hard crease between his eyebrows and his jaw clenched. Tony silently fumes, crosses his arms, and stands a little taller. He’s outnumbered here, and he knows it, but he’s a Stark, and Starks don’t back down. Especially not when they’re right. (And he _is_ right.)

“They’re kids, Cap, not Nazis,” Tony retorts, the words bitter on his tongue, and Steve draws away but doesn’t back down.

“I’ve seen children younger kill full-grown men with their bare hands,” Natasha offers icily, staring at Stark with a stony expression on her face.

Clint shifts awkwardly beside her and clears his throat. “I don’t like it,” he states cleanly. “That one girl keeps looking at me funny.” His eyes are trained on the holding cell, where the small group of children were all locked in, most of them huddling together, and Tony couldn’t see anything but a bunch of terrified kids. He sure as hell didn’t see deadly assassins, or undercover operatives. Then again, SHIELD probably programmed Clint and Natasha to view literally everyone and everything as a threat, because the bastards over there lived in magical pretend land, where everyone is working for the bad guys and no one is safe, hide your kids, hide your wife, hide your fucking panties.

With nearly all of the team weighed in on the issue, the tie-breaker (or tie-maker, as it stood) was Bruce, and when everyone slowly turned to face him, standing off to the side with his back against a wall, he looked up and blinked at them.

“You’re really going to ask me whether I think she’s a threat?” Bruce asks, gesturing to the little girl currently held in his arms, now awake and giggling as she pulls on his hair repeatedly. It was a wonder he wasn’t hulking out, with that kind of pestering, but Tony just chalks that up to another point in the ‘Not Dangerous’ column and presses his lips together to keep from smiling too openly. Bruce looks _delighted._

Natasha refuses to acknowledge Bruce, instead turning back to stare at the group of kids with cold eyes, and asks “Has anyone been able to contact director Fury?”

Steve looks down at his phone in consternation and says, somewhat pouty, “No.”

“What are we going to do?” Clint asks, and he still won’t take his eyes off the holding cell.

Steve seems to consider this for a moment, putting away his phone, and says “Keep them detained until we can contact director Fury and figure out their motives.” Tony…Tony just wants to hit him. Because who thought he’d ever see the day when Captain _fucking_ America turns his back on a bunch of children.

Tony snorts, and barbs “I thought you were a patriot,” and Steve pins him with a look that _seethes_ loathing and anger, and he’s still got that impossible air about him, the one that reminds everyone, constantly, _‘I’m Captain America. I’m good and wholesome and I can do whatever I want because I’m a symbol for the American people,’_ and Tony actually can’t stand this anymore.

“I am,” Steve says with thinning patience, his jaw taut, his chin tilting upward like he’s preparing to face Tony in a fist fight. As if he’s still that weak little kid growing up in Brooklyn that got beat up every other damn day. Tony, at least, has standards.

“You’re keeping a bunch of _children_ in a cage designed for an indestructible rage monster!” Tony yells indignantly, trying to keep his satisfaction in check when Steve flinches. He made Captain America flinch. “No offense, Bruce,” he tacks on at the end, turning to Bruce, still holding the little girl off to the side.

“None taken,” Bruce replies wryly, his lips twisting into an amused smile. Tony has half a mind to think that he’s the one most inclined to agree with Tony on this; the other guy hadn’t hurt the kid, and he certainly wasn’t going to, which meant something is up. He’d just prefer to find out what’s going on _without_ killing a bunch of children. Ten, to be exact. _Ten_ kids that Tony hopes to see actually live through this.

“Well, what are we supposed to do?” Steve replies belatedly, still all-brawn and no-brain, though Tony must admit that he hasn’t the slightest idea what to do with a bunch of children that suddenly popped into their tower. For the first (and hopefully last) time in his life, Tony wishes director Fury were reachable, just so they could all stop bickering and be told how the hell to handle this.

Then again, Fury’s likely reaction would’ve been similar to Natasha’s, and he would’ve had much better aim.

There’s a tapping against the glass where the kids are being detained, like they’re animals in a zoo, and they all jump and look over to the one standing right next to the glass, the older boy that had saved—well, that had put Tony’s reactor back in. He’s still not sure he’s willing to bet that saving him was the kid’s intention.

“How about we have a little chat?” The kid says with a slight grin, like he’s highly amused by all this, and it stuns Tony enough that he doesn’t even react when the blue-eyed girl makes quick work of the security system, and the reinforced glass door slides open to let the kid walk out, hands up in surrender.


	7. Chapter 7

In retrospect, Peter thinks, it probably wasn’t the best idea to prove to all of them that they were perfectly capable of hacking a Stark security system. Then again, it does make quick work of the whole we-don’t-want-to-hurt-you talk, because they very well could’ve escaped sooner if they wanted the element of surprise.

He’s fairly sure that’s the only thing that keeps Natasha from throwing a collection of knives at his chest. Clint has an arrow cocked and half-raised toward him, but stops when Peter doesn’t make any move to step forward, or do anything threatening. His hands are still raised.

Slowly, so as to not cause alarm, he turns and nods at Kennedy, and she taps a few more buttons until the doors slide closed. Then she joins the others, huddled in the center of the too-white room, all of them watching Peter like a riveting action flick.

Peter looks back at the Avengers and then nods over to the seating area. It’s in a different place on this floor than the one they usually occupy, but considering that floor was blown to hell right now, they’re here.

Natasha seems the most skittish, and Peter makes a mental note to keep an eye on her, in case she suddenly decides they aren’t worth the risk. He leads them all over to array of furniture, dragging a solitary chair on the end over to face them, and then sits down. His hands are motionless on his lap, and he doesn’t move them because he knows both Clint and Natasha are watching them.

The Avengers seem to sit according to their current stance on the situation, with Natasha, Clint, and Steve on one couch, Tony and Thor on the loveseat, and Bruce—still holding Amy—on the armchair. Before he says anything, he nods toward Amy, who seems to be calmly fiddling with Bruce’s glasses, and asks “She okay?”

Bruce looks down, a little startled, and then back up to Peter. He nods, and Peter lets himself relax a bit more. At the very least, if everything goes to hell, he thinks Amy is safe. He starts mapping escape routes and where he’d have to position everyone if they have to fight their way out, but he stops himself before he gets too far. Better to deal with that if they come to it.

He turns to face the group again, watching him raptly, most of them with the same look of confusion on their faces. Peter is reminded again of how weird this is, and shrugs it off. Now isn’t the time. Clint is subtly trying to switch his real arrows out for the tranquilizer kind, and Peter feels a rush of hope at that. Because if Clint— _this_ Clint, he reminds himself—is willing to maybe consider letting him live, then they have a chance here.

He sure as hell hopes they have a chance here. They don’t have anywhere else to go.

“Who are you?” Natasha asks coldly, snapping Peter from his silent contemplation of the situation. He scrubs a hand through his hair and tries to keep his focus. He hasn’t slept in…a long time.

“My name is Peter.” He figures that giving simple answers will have the Avengers opening up and asking him more questions, which would be incredibly helpful for him, because despite having spent the last hour or so unconscious, he’s still exhausted. He can feel an unusual amount of dirt clinging to the layers of his skin, and all he wants right now is a hot shower and to curl up and sleep with the rest of them around him.

Natasha’s eyebrows flick up at that, but the follow-up question comes from Tony, surprisingly.

“How did you get here?”

Peter has to bite down on his cheek to keep from doing a double take when he looks at Tony. The logical part of his brain _knows,_ knows that it’s not the same person, that they might as well be strangers, but he can’t help but want to trust this Tony, as well.

“This,” Peter hesitates, drawing out the words and pauses so no one gets too panicked, “is where things get a little…tricky.” Tony doesn’t look too amused, nor do any of the other Avengers, so he figures he’ll just—yeah, probably best to just spit it out. “We’re from an alternate universe.”

The blank stares he gets in return helps to at least place what kind of timeline they’re operating on here. For one, they don’t seem particularly shocked—so far no one’s told him to get the hell out, like he’s crazy—but they’re not exactly laid-back, either. The crease between Steve’s eyebrows is so deep that Peter wonders if it’ll ever go away. But he suspects that’s more to do with when Steve grew up than anything.

Tony, at least, seems mildly less lost, though he’s still trying to piece things together in his head, Peter can tell. Judging by their ages, this universe is still a ways behind on that kind of technology, but Peter’s honestly just glad they didn’t wind up in some universe so far from their own that Stark Tower didn’t exist. Suddenly popping into a world just to free-fall seventeen floors is a leap of faith he’d been hoping they wouldn’t have to make.

Fuck, he’s tired.

“How?” Tony asks, predictably, but Peter notices the way Steve and Clint pull back at that, like they’d rather skip over the technical aspects right now. Peter has to agree; he doesn’t think he’ll manage to stay awake long enough to explain it, or even to translate for Kennedy. The adrenaline is wearing off, and it’s taking its toll.

He waves a hand carelessly in the general direction of the holding cell and says “Blue can explain it to you later, I don’t know all the technical aspects.” That’s a lie, but it’ll have to do for now. There are more pressing manners.

“Where are you parents?”

Peter cringes. Of course Steve would be the one to ask that question. Natasha doesn’t see them as anything but a threat, Tony’s still hung up about the ‘alternate universe’ thing, Thor probably doesn’t know what’s going on right now, Bruce has a toddler serving as a pretty hefty distraction from the conversation, and Clint is probably too dumbstruck to think of it.

Peter forces a steady breath of air into his lungs, holds it, and then lets it out before he answers. None of them ever really got the chance to process it, back home, when they were too busy surviving. He didn’t expect it would hurt this much.

“Dead,” he says finally, and closes his eyes.


	8. Chapter 8

Bruce doesn’t know when he makes the decision to intervene, but once he’s made it, he’s not going to back down. It’s obvious these kids are beyond exhausted—and from what Peter’s explained to them so far, in their universe, some sort of alien race invaded and destroyed pretty much everything. They’ve been fighting these things for so long that when the adrenaline high finally wears off completely, he wouldn’t be surprised if each of the kids just collapsed from exhaustion.

Either way, he seems to be the only one not so completely enthralled by Peter’s explanation of their situation to notice the way his eyes won’t fully open, or the way he starts repeating himself.

“Alright,” he says, standing and startling everyone from their single-point focus. “As a doctor, I’m going to postpone this conversation until after these kids have gotten some proper sleep. And possibly a bath.”

Five sets of eyes blink back at him like he’s gone and lost it, but luckily, for whatever reason, holding a now-sleeping little girl in his arms softens some of the glares he gets. The kid—Peter—just looks over at him with relief and gratefulness written all over his face.

Steve almost argues, but Bruce cuts him off with a well-timed look, and he shifts the little girl in his arms, already used to the added weight. He doesn’t know why she’s chosen to cling to him, but Peter doesn’t seem to think he poses any threat to her, which is—well, it’s something. With his tendency to turn green and start smashing things, he normally tries to stay as far away from children as possible.

Bruce walks the little girl back to where the others are, huddled together and staring out at them with mostly terrified eyes. Peter trails sluggishly behind him, and just as he reaches the door, the strangely quiet girl opens the door again. In seconds, there’s a boy, about the same age as the girl Bruce is holding, tugging at his pant-leg and looking up at who Bruce assumes to be his sister.

A girl with flaming red hair steps forward and says gently, “I’ll take her,” and it only takes Bruce a minute to decide that’s probably best. He hands her over carefully, and the little boy goes from tugging at his pant-leg to tugging at his sister’s boot, lower to the ground now that the young girl has taken her.

Peter makes a move to step into the holding cell with the others, but Bruce holds out a hand to stop him, and waits to speak until Peter looks up at him.

“I think you could all use with a bathroom and some real beds.” Bruce doesn’t miss the flash of hope in both Peter and the red-haired girl’s eyes. “Separate rooms or…”

He doesn’t have to finish because Peter shakes his head immediately, and says “just one, if you can manage.”

Bruce thought so. He doesn’t question them, just nods and turns to Stark, who is watching him carefully with the others. “Is there a room they can have?”

Steve seems outraged at that, and comes stalking up to Bruce, no doubt trying to look intimidating but Bruce is so far past caring that it doesn’t do much good. “You can’t just let them go! We still don’t know what they’re capable of, let alone what their purpose is here.”

Bruce raises an eyebrow at that, because he’s fairly sure their “purpose” in coming here was to _live,_ simple as that. But that’s neither here nor there at the moment, so Bruce just challenges Steve with “I think they’ve already established that containing them isn’t exactly effective, considering they broke out of a cell intended for _me.”_

Steve, at least, looks properly affronted, and doesn’t protest as Bruce leads the group of hesitant children down the hall, where Stark is opening the door to one of the larger suites that no one of the Avengers has ever found the reason to use.

The red-haired girl places the toddler down on one of the smaller beds the moment they’re inside, and immediately the little girl’s brother is scrambling up next to her, asleep the moment he grabs her hand. A couple of the younger children seem to be drifting, as well, but the older ones all stand guard protectively in front of them, facing Stark and Bruce in the door as if they expect some sort of trick.

Stark, probably still reeling from the day’s events, leaves with saying much of anything. Bruce gives Peter an understanding nod, and then closes the door as he leaves them to their own devices.

He’s not exactly looking forward to the situation that’s about to blow up the moment Bruce gets back to the other Avengers, but at this point, there’s really no avoiding it. He sighs, and figures he might as well get it over with. If he hulks out in the middle, he just hopes that the others know it’s damn well their fault for whatever damage he does. For once, Bruce isn’t willing to take the blame anymore.


	9. Chapter 9

“I’ll take first watch,” Sammy says, the moment Bruce closes the door. Claire nods in understanding, and Mara doesn’t even register that she heard, but Peter—predictably—tries to fight him.

Sammy just shakes his head and says “You won’t make it through the first watch. You can take over after Mara and Claire.” It’s a sign of just how tired Peter is that he nods without pushing the issue any further, and he hardly manages to make it to the chair in the corner of the room before he’s out like a light.

Mac and Nari are sharing a small bed in the far corner, with Mo in the middle, and Kennedy positions herself curled in a protective position around the twins. Mara is sitting by one of the windows, staring out silently as the sun begins to set, and she doesn’t look ready to sleep anytime soon, but then, when does she ever sleep?

Claire is the one to find the bathroom—the one door that doesn’t open out into the hallway, and says “I’m going to try to clean up first,” before she disappears, and Sammy hears the shower start up moments later. He ignores the twitch in his skin that says he could really use the same, and instead settles himself down next to the door to the hallway, facing the entirety of the room and trying to ignore how bare he feels without a weapon at his side. He doesn’t remember when he lost it, but sometime during that last fight, he’d run out of bullets, and he still wishes he had it here, even though they aren’t fighting the _tinea_ here.

Sammy pointedly ignores the part of his brain that says they’re safe here, because he knows it isn’t true. Not necessarily. For all the parallels between their universe and this one, they still don’t know these Avengers. If they had the means and opportunity, Sammy would be fighting tooth and nail with Peter to get out of here—maybe find someplace in Canada to settle down, because the super villains that the Avengers would be called in to fight _never_ show up in Canada.

That’s assuming this universe’s Canada is anything like the Canada back home. Or if there even is a Canada.

Hell, they don’t even know anything about this world, beyond the fact that the Avengers Tower exists in the same exact place (luckily) and that the Avengers—while younger than anyone in their group would remember—seem more or less the same.

Though he hasn’t seen D—Agent Coulson yet. A part of him is afraid to ask, because for all he knows, this universe’s Phil Coulson doesn’t even work for SHIELD—or maybe there isn’t a SHIELD. Besides, he likes to think that not seeing a younger version of Phil Coulson walking around keeps his head clear, or at least clearer than the rest.

Which is why he thinks they need to get out of here, even though he knows that plan would never fly. Because they’ve been running and fighting and trying to hold Avengers Tower against the _tinea_ for the better part of a year, and then they would up here, and so far everyone bur Mara, Nari, and him have reincarnations of their parents walking around like they hadn’t died over a year ago.

Hell, he probably wouldn’t be inclined to leave either, if his Dad was suddenly not dead.

But that’s just it, isn’t it? These people—this universe’s Avengers—are not their parents. They look like their parents, and act like their parents would’ve when they were younger, before any of them had kids, but the cold, hard truth of it is that they’re _not._ Their parents are dead, and sooner or later, everyone is going to have to accept that.

But then there’s the issue of Mo.

Mo, short for Modi, is two. Both his parents died when he was barely even one. And Sammy doesn’t know what to do about that. Because Mo, along with the twins, are probably never going to remember their real parents. They can’t make the distinction between this universe’s Avengers and their own universe’s Avengers, and as much as Sammy’s instincts are screaming at him to get the hell out while they still can, he doesn’t know if he can do that to them.

They’re so young. They deserve a chance with their real parents, even if everything is all blown to hell in this universe, and just because Sammy hasn’t seen anything to keep him from running doesn’t mean he’s right to do so. Dad raised him to be rational. To consider what’s best for everyone, and not just himself. To do what he’s told, but only when he’s sure he believes in what’s being done.

Maybe that’s what’s best here. Staying. Trying to figure out what these Avengers are going to do with them, and if they have any chance at all of remaking their lives the way it should’ve been. The way it would’ve if the damn _tinea_ hadn’t taken over the whole damn world, raining down in swarms so thick that it seemed like the sky was falling.

If they have a chance at that here, then Sammy is damn well going to take it—if not for himself, then for the others. Because they need it.

Because it’s what Dad would’ve done.


	10. Chapter 10

“I don’t trust them,” Natasha states, arms crossed.

 _“As you’ve said,”_ Stark replies drily, rolling his eyes. Steve frowns and tries not to pay attention to how easily their team cracked apart like this. He’s supposed to be their leader, and so he should be keeping them all unified, but he wholeheartedly agrees with Natasha and Clint on this one, and he doesn’t know what to do about Stark.

Then again, Steve never knows what to do about Stark.

“We need to call director Fury,” Steve repeats, like he hasn’t already said this many times. Since Bruce declared that the kids all needed rest before any further explanation could be given, they’ve been sitting around, arguing their points, waiting for the call to patch through for director Fury. They haven’t been able to reach him since before the fight started. Steve would be worried, but it’s Fury.

Stark doesn’t bother making an offhand comment at Steve’s deferral to their superior, though he has the last few times Steve brought it up. JARVIS has been attempting to contact Fury pretty much non-stop since Steve declared he wasn’t having any luck. They’ll know the second they can reach him.

“Right, because we’re a bunch of children incapable of making decisions without Daddy around,” Stark complains, rolling his eyes, and Steve clenches his jaw to keep from snapping back. The last thing they need is another round of bickering that doesn’t manage to get them anywhere.

“They could be a security ris—”

“They’re _children,_ ” Stark shouts, inconsolable. They’ve hashed this out already, and Steve hasn’t been able to figure out what’s got Stark so set on fighting against the team. He gets the feeling he isn’t hearing the whole story, but no one has bothered to fill him in otherwise, so he’s following orders. That’s possibly why Stark takes issue with how he’s handling this; he’s never really been one for orders. But really, in this situation, it makes the most sense.

He’s about to suggest what he believes they should do, in lieu of Director Fury’s guidance, but at that precise moment, JARVIS politely informs them that Fury is on the other line, and in moments, his voice comes from the ceiling.

“Avengers,” he says curtly, and Steve stops trying to pinpoint where the voice is coming from, because modern technology is beyond him.

“Sir,” Steve replies, and the Director asks them what’s going on. “We neutralized the threat downtown, sir,” he replies succinctly, “but we’re still dealing with the results of an…unrelated incident.”

 _“Incident,”_ Stark snorts derisively, but doesn’t interrupt. Steve glares at him anyway. He doesn’t have time to deal with taming Stark right now.

“What is it?” Fury demands, and Steve—well, he hesitates. Later, Stark will say it’s because he finally remembered that he had a heart, but really, it’s got more to do with his doubts about the security of this line. Stark continually reminds him that he designed all the phones, and they’re on his network, with his security software, which should mean they’re perfectly secure with no unwanted persons listening in. But Steve knows that even one conversation intercepted by the enemy could turn the tides of war, and he isn’t willing to take that chance.

“I…believe you should see for yourself, sir,” Steve replies. There’s a pause, but Fury seems to come to an agreement and says “Very well. Fifteen minutes. Keep a lid on things until then, Captain.”

“Director?” He pauses, wondering just how much Stark is going to lay into him for saying this, but this doesn’t concern Stark and his hangups. “Bring backup.” He thinks Fury nods, but before he gets any verbal affirmative, he’s already gone. It takes not one second for all hell to break loose among their little group, splitting back into factions like they’re two teams, rather than one. Right around the time that Bruce’s calm exterior starts cracking is when Steve shouts over all of them to put a lid on it until Fury gets here.

Stark huffs and crosses his arms and glares daggers at Steve, and Bruce excuses himself before he hulks out, going to wake the kids because they’re going to want to be awake before Fury gets here. Thor seems just as torn up as Steve about the way their team is acting right now, and Clint gives up on Natasha and her issues and goes to play those games on Stark’s television.

Steve is just thanking his lucky stars when Fury arrives swiftly, JARVIS informing him that he’s in the elevator. Bruce herds the children like ducklings into the main room, Natasha and Stark stand on opposite sides of them, both of their mouths pressed into tight lines. Steve tries to ignore the tension in the room and stands in front of all of them, watching the elevator numbers go up, and up, and up.

Fury steps out with a small mob of SHIELD agents hot on his heels, and he takes one step into the room before he stops and his one eye widens incrementally. Steve thinks it doesn’t bode well that this has managed to surprise even Fury, but the director manages to hide it well, and the only sign that he’s anything other than ruthlessly emotionless is the twitch in his jaw.

“Explain,” he says shortly, and Steve opens his mouth to speak, but before he can, one of the kids—the eldest, what was his name?—steps forward to face Fury. Fury seems to size him up, one eye rolling sharply in his head, and then sets his jaw and waits for the kid to pipe up. Steve really thinks he should be taking point on this, or at least one of the Avengers, but he doubts any of them quite understand all that multiple-universe mumbo-jumbo. Possibly Bruce, but he also thinks the kids are harmless.

“Director Fury,” the kid starts confidently, and a vein next to Fury’s eyepatch twitches at the name. Steve narrows his eyes and watches attentively. The one thing Stark and Bruce had managed to miss while they were busy arguing their points is that these kids—whoever they are—know each and every one of their names. Steve doesn’t know about the rest of them, but he certainly never introduced himself. He doesn’t like not having the upper hand.

“My name is Peter,” the kid—Peter, right—say amicably. He seems much too calm about this entire situation, Steve thinks. They know nothing about these kids, other than that they claim to be from another universe, and that they know quite a bit about the Avengers and the tower. They know too much.

Steve very carefully does not think about what SHIELD does to rogue people that know too much.

“We’re not trying to cause trouble,” he placates, and neither Steve nor Fury believe it for a second. “We just needed a place to go. We were fighting off an invasion, sir, and we were out of options, so my sister–” Steve notices how he doesn’t pick out which one is his sister, and thinks it’s probably deliberate. Suspicious. He’s dealt with enough German operatives and Russian sleeper agents to know how to spot a lie of omission. “–got this machine working, and it transported us to another universe. Here.” He spreads his arms, as if Fury doesn’t understand what ‘here’ means, and Steve has to admit, the kid knows how to speak.

Fury grinds his jaw. It’s strange, Steve realizes after a second, because Fury almost never shows any outward signs of distress. He’s not looking at Peter, though. Steve traces his eye line to what seems to be one of the kids. The young teenaged girl with dark skin, and an expressionless glare fit to rival Fury’s. They’re eerily similar, and Steve wonders if there’s a reason for that, but before he can think much on it, Fury snaps to attention, turning to Peter.

“You lot are coming back to SHIELD immediately. Don’t get cute and try to resist.” As if they all had a psychic connection to Fury, the handful of SHIELD agents step forward, guns at their sides, slowly swarming around the group of kids and corralling them forward. As expected, Stark starts pitching a fit, but Steve glares him down and tells him “Shut up. That’s an order.”

It must be the fact that Steve can feel his anger rolling off him in waves, but Stark goes down without much of a fight, crossing his arms and casting curious eyes at the group of children as they look on with wide, scared eyes at the SHIELD agents. So far, no one’s gotten out of hand, and Steve just hopes things will stay that way. He doesn’t trust the kids not to harm one of them, but he doesn’t particularly want to see them hurt.

“Bring them straight to medical,” Fury barks at the agents, and they start marching the kids toward the elevator. It’ll probably take a few trips to get them all down, despite how excessively large Stark had the elevators built. Fury turns back to them, and his eye grazes over each of them before resting on Steve. “Under no circumstances are any of you to set foot inside SHIELD until I tell you to. Stark, that includes computers and security cameras.”

Stark rolls his eyes, but seems to have lost his fight. He’ll probably break into the security the moment Fury has his back turned, if he hasn’t already done it. Steve would tell him to shut it down, but Stark would laugh in his face, because it’s not as if Steve would be able to tell if he had or not. Stark could probably just press some button and make it all seem that way. Steve doesn’t even know what a computer ‘hack’ looks like. He leaves it alone.

“I want you all grounded. That means no private jets or yachts or flying metal suits to _anywhere,_ Stark.”

Stark shoots Fury a scowl and then promptly stomps out of the room, headed for the staircase that leads to his workshop. Like a teenager. Steve bites down on his cheek and says nothing.

“Xavier and his circus freaks–” Steve glances at Clint and catches the tail end of a barely-covered wince, but Fury doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care. “–can come out to play for awhile. Maybe there won’t be a city when we get back,” he hitches a shoulder like this isn’t a bad thing, and then stares each of them down again. Without so much as a nod, he turns and follows his SHIELD grunts and the kids, leaving them all standing in somewhat stunned silence.

Steve frowns as they dissipate—apparently Stark’s absence ratcheted down the tension a few notches—and thinks. Surely Fury knows that they don’t need more than a day’s rest to recuperate. If push came to shove, they could be back out on the streets in a few hours, and they’d do just fine. For heaven’s sake, they had done just fine in worse conditions. So why the no-fly until further notice?

Steve shakes his head in thought, and figures that the only explanation must be that something has Fury spooked. Something about these kids. Steve’s been feeling it too, that strange feeling that makes him want to almost agree with Stark sometimes. The kids look familiar. Like Steve’s known them all along.

But the logical part of his brain only makes that more worrying, and so he shuts down any strange, residual guilt he might be feeling about letting a group of children get detained by SHIELD and assaulted by god-only-knows what kind of tests, and goes to beat a few good rounds into the punching bag in the basement.


	11. Chapter 11

Mara expected this would happen. She informs Claire that it’s best to go willingly, and leaves it to her to keep the younger ones calm. She’s not good with kids—not even kids her own age. She keeps quiet, studying the situation, sizing up the SHIELD agents serving as their escorts. If they had a moment alone to plan, they could probably escape. So far, the SHIELD base looks exactly the same as the one at home. There’s no place she knows better.

But she also doesn’t think escaping is the best plan. Just a contingency plan—one of many. Right now, they’re a security risk. She understands that much. Fury’s intention is to minimize both panic, and the possibility of an attack on either the Avengers or the rest of the world. But he’s also got enough sense to know that a group of children are marginally less likely to attempt a world takeover than a group of adults.

Of course, their age could work in their favor.

But her gut is telling her to go along. Follow protocol. She lets the SHIELD doctors look them over, run their tests, poke and prod until they’re content. She speaks only when spoken to, choosing instead to watch. Listen. Analyze.

She doesn’t say a word to the psychologist they send in to talk to her, but she doesn’t think this will count against her. The others have probably said more than enough to satisfy everyone’s curiosity.

They sequester them in a large holding facility with multiple bedrooms, though they immediately pick out the most easily defensible one and disregard the others. Peter, Sammy, and Claire are all aware that they’re no longer in a war zone, but none of them go to make changes, so Mara doesn’t either. She takes first watch, and she waits.

It takes a total of five days for Fury to come, as she suspected he would. When he does, Claire is on watch, but Mara is awake, and she knows just from the sound of breathing in the room that he’s come.

Before Claire can speak a word, she approaches the door, where Fury stands perfectly still, staring. She nods to Claire in reassurance, and then at Fury in some sort of silent understanding, then walks out the door. She clasps her hands behind her back and walks briskly, not waiting for Fury, knowing her way. Fury matches her pace, and they walk stoically down the mostly deserted corridors, scattering any rogue agents or scientists as they move. Not many are awake at this hour, though time seems to blur when underground like this.

Neither of them speak a word until they reach their destination, a small room in an abandoned part of the headquarters. It was damaged many years ago by an accidental explosion, but judging by the faint lingering scent of smoke, it’s been rather recent in this universe. The repair crew says it’s structurally unsound, but the path they follow has never done them wrong.

She doesn’t sit, and neither does Fury, but they turn to face each other in the dim, emergency work lights set up before they abandoned hope of recovering this sector.

Despite her training, she finds that she still struggles with facing this man. Not as much as she suspects the others struggle with facing their ghosts, but enough to make this meeting disconcerting. The eyepatch is on the wrong side.

She’s been debating how to start this, because there’s a possibility that she’s wrong. This universe could differ from theirs in nearly any way imaginable. From her limited understanding of Kennedy’s rapid sign, just because one element of this universe is the same, it does not follow that a related element is also the same. But, as they say, there’s no harm in trying.

“Abused patience turns to fury,” she says.

There’s a moment where neither of them move or breathe, and Fury studies her carefully, narrowing his one eye. “And fury itself provides arms,” he responds.

Mara sighs, unable to help the relief flooding through her system. She knows it doesn’t mean all is in the clear, but it helps to see the slight flicker of something in Fury’s eye. She isn’t blind to the way he’s given them the benefit of the doubt so far, which is not something Fury does. It implies a certain degree of trust has been established, which is what she plans to work with.

“Why did you come here?” Fury asks without preamble. She doesn’t hesitate to respond.

“To seek asylum from an alien race that’s taken over our world.”

“What is your purpose?”

“To live.”

Fury’s expression shifts at that, incrementally, but she notices because she knows him. Probably better than everyone in this universe combined. That’s a terrifying thought for the both of them.

“What is the extent of your knowledge of SHIELD and the Avengers?” Fury asks next, and this is the question that’s going to be the one that decides their fate. But there’s no getting around it.

“Extensive,” she replies honestly, not bothering to hedge. “Enough that placing us elsewhere would be an unacceptable risk.” He nods once, processing this information. Before he can ask anything else, she continues. “We also know information I believe would be valuable to both SHIELD and the Avengers.”

His eye sparks in interest, another one of those micro-expressions that only she sees.

“What does this information pertain to?”

She shrugs casually and glances away. “Technology. Inside knowledge about potential future enemies and their weaknesses. Limited but useful tactical understanding of certain missions and events.” She cuts her eyes back to him. “Enough data on the alien race that destroyed our world to prepare for and possibly prevent the same from occurring here.”

She knows before she’s even finished her sentence that it’s enough. It would be unwise of Fury to disregard this information with the argument that their universes are different, and that any and all preparation for the _tinea_ may be unnecessary. He also knows this information comes at a price. Imprisoning and torturing a group of children will not only fail to yield the information they want, but will alienate the majority of SHIELD, and permanently splinter the Avengers, if the distrust she’s seen from Natasha and Steve is justified.

“What do you suggest?” Fury asks, and she _hadn’t_ expected that question. She knows what she would like for them, but she hadn’t gotten her hopes up. Decisions like this are rarely left to children. She didn’t know Fury’s initial trust for her would extend quite this far.

“Refugee status,” she begins slowly, crossing her arms over herself defensively. Fury probably knows it’s deliberate, but he also knows that a part of it is because she’s scared. “Interaction with the Avengers and SHIELD in any capacity you see fit, to form connections and facilitate the sharing of relevant information. And if I may speak freely, sir…” she trails off, searching Fury’s face for any sign of acceptance.

He nods once, and she chews on her cheek before she speaks. She glances around the room nervously, knowing she’s letting too much emotion show, knowing she needs to keep her mouth shut before this entire plan goes to hell. But she’s having trouble separating the two in her mind, the man that raised her, dead, and the younger, living version standing before her. The one that knows her only as a security risk, nothing more.

She draws in a shaky breath, meets Fury’s eyes, and says “We want a home.”


	12. Chapter 12

It’s the damn kids that put the final nail in the coffin of Clint and Natasha’s relationship. Clint knows it’s been sneaking up on them for months, now, maybe even years. Maybe since the beginning, they always knew it would end this way. But it doesn’t stop it from hurting.

She’s stubborn. He knows this. She’s stubborn and rational and professional and the only thing she’s ever done against orders is get involved with Clint. It’s in her nature to go along with the plan until it no longer benefits her. She puts herself first, always, and Clint’s always admired that about her.

And then the damn kids show up, and she’s running scared. Despite her façade of calm professionalism, he reads the fear in her eyes, in the way that she holds herself. He knows that she’s afraid of what these kids are doing to her, what they’re making her feel—what they’re making them all feel. They’ve been sequestered away at SHIELD for damn near a week now, but the shock is still there.

She’s afraid of letting herself feel too much. Even with Clint, she was always this way. And maybe it says something about their relationship that she never tried to run. She never tried because she never feared she was feeling too much. Getting too attached. She never loved Clint enough to let it change her.

He thinks if he felt the same way about the kids, they might have made it. If he were really willing to believe that they’re nothing more than a security risk, an enemy, and the feeling he got at the back of his neck, like a cold, tingling sensation, was no more than that. It didn’t mean anything. It was just unease.

But unlike Natasha, he’s never been good at ignoring his instincts. And right now, every instinct in his body is telling him that these kids aren’t threats. They were never threats. They’re just scared kids looking for a home. He understands that.

Maybe that’s why he can’t keep agreeing with her.

He doesn’t know much about Natasha’s past, but he’s spent enough nights with her to know bits and pieces. There was a fire. A fire that changed everything, tore everything she had away from her, and left her bare and vulnerable. And that’s when the shields went up. That’s how you make a deadly assassin. The moment she lost her home, she decided that she didn’t need one.

Clint spent his whole damn life searching for a home, and when he found Natasha, he thought he’d finally found it. He thought he could show her that it’s okay to form attachments. That it’s okay to find a home in another person, believe in that kind of commitment, love another person enough to need them. He thought he could heal her.

He was wrong. And in the end, it will always be that fact that tore them apart. Not the kids. Not SHIELD, or the Avengers, or anything outside themselves. They fell apart because Clint was ready for a home, and Natasha wasn’t. Simple as that.

“I still love you,” he says, and it’s true.

“I know,” she responds, and turns away from him.

“I wish—” he starts, and swallows the rest of the sentence.

“Me, too,” she whispers, and walks out of the room.

It doesn’t hurt as much as he thought it would. He’s not even that upset. That probably says more about him than anything. He just can’t help but feel that this is where they’ve been headed all along. They were never going to agree, in the end. Clint wants a home, and a partner, and maybe one day, a family. He wants to have a normal life, or as close as he can get considering who he is. Natasha—she wouldn’t want that. She might try, for him. She might’ve done a lot of things she didn’t want, just because she wants him to be happy. Because he was the first person she gave half a damn about, and she didn’t—doesn’t—want to lose that. But it wouldn’t have made her happy. What kind of person would it make him if he fought to keep something that only he wanted? What would it have done to them, in the end?

“That’s it, then,” he says to the empty room, and goes to find Tony and his hacked security video of the kids.


	13. Chapter 13

Mara wakes Peter up in the middle of the night, and his first instinct is to grab for Kennedy and his gun, in that order, and try to kill whatever thing is coming after them now. He flails and his heart hammers away in his chest, but then Mara is telling him to calm down, that they’re safe, that she needs to speak to him alone.

He breathes out a shaky breath and blinks as his eyes adjust to the dark. They’re still in the SHIELD quarters, and mostly everyone is asleep except for Sammy, who’s got watch. He thinks the psychologists find the fact that they still keep watch disconcerting, but none of the older kids can get to sleep unless they know someone is watching their backs. They might as well keep it up.

Mara nods to Sammy, who nods back, and drags Peter into the other room, one of the ones they’re not using. He thinks the psychologists also find that worrisome, but dad never really put much stock in psychologists, anyway.

Mara flips on the lights. “What’s up?” Peter asks in a whisper, looking around the room as if something will clue him in.

Mara pins him with a look, her posture coiled tight. She’s a skilled fighter, and her mind is sharp and analytical, which came in handy when they were fighting the _tinea._ But now that they’re out of immediate danger, it seems, he’s starting to feel that residual fear from before the siege creep back in. Mara never was close with any of them until after, and he never got to know her well enough to trust her. She and her father usually just prowled around on the outskirts, barking orders and manipulating things, and while he’ll probably always be thankful for her help during the invasion, he’s not going to try to remain close. She doesn’t seem to want that, anyway. Maybe it’s for the best they part ways here.

“Fury is going to send you back to the tower.”

 _“What?”_ Peter squeaks, eyes widening, because he hadn’t expected that. Not so soon, anyway. So many things are suspicious about their circumstances, and he knows the Avengers and SHIELD know they’re hiding something, even if they don’t know why. He figured Fury would sooner torture him until he broke then send them back with the Avengers.

But Mara just shakes her head impatiently and says dismissively “We spoke,” like that explains anything. “But that’s not what I need to talk to you about,” she adds hastily, looking around the room with threat-assessment eyes. Lingering on the cracks beneath the doors. When she looks back up, her eyes are sharp and desperate. He knows what this is about.

“You think…” he trails off, hoping simultaneously that he’s wrong.

She nods, and he contains the dread bubbling up in his chest, threatening to take him over. They’ve still got time. Maybe this time it’ll be different. Maybe this time…

“I’m going to stay at SHIELD,” Mara continues in clipped, terse tones. “Work with Fury on this side.”

Peter nods, and tries to shift back to survival mode. It’s not hard—it’s been two weeks since they fled, and as much as he’d like to believe the war is finally over, he’s never going to stop keeping his guard up.

“Peter, you can’t tell them too much,” she pleads, and Peter draws back in shock because Mara doesn’t plead. Mara gives orders, or follows orders she agrees with silently. She doesn’t plead.

“But—” he starts, frowning. Telling the Avengers everything is the only way they’re going to get out of this. He can’t go through this all again. He won’t.

Mara shakes her head forcefully. “Scaring them into battle mode isn’t going to get anything done. They’re going to rush, and make mistakes, and then we’ll be screwed all over again. We’re not even certain if it’s going to happen here, and even if it does, we’ve got _years.”_

“We’re going to need all the time we can—”

“And we’ll have it. But making everyone panic isn’t going to help. Go back to the tower. Settle in. Stark and your sister will probably hit it off right away.” Peter laughs hollowly, because that, at least, he can count on. “We’ll tell them everything, eventually. When the time is right. But until then…” she trails off. In that moment, she doesn’t look like the Mara he remembers. She looks more fragile. Scared. It hurts to see it, hurts knowing that they’re both facing this all over again, but he’s not backing down. He’s going to get them through this, no matter what it takes. Mara understands that.

He nods in solidarity, and she meets his eyes and nods back.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to write a Darcy chapter, and it ended up being a fun chapter, and even though it doesn't mesh with the mood of rest of the story, I think from Darcy's perspective, this situation would be quite comical. *shrug*

It’s like walking into a madhouse, which is saying something because Darcy’s been to madhouses, and because the Avengers tower is normally pretty much a madhouse, so really this is more like walking into a madhouse mixed with a funhouse mixed with one of those weird houses where nothing quite lines up and the floor is all sideways and whoa, okay, did that kid just call Jane ‘mommy’? And then promptly knock her over?

Oh, this is just too good. She grins widely when Jane finally rights herself, looking a little frazzled and shell-shocked, and the kid that just floored her runs to jump up on Thor, who swings him around onto his shoulders and booms “YOU WILL INDEED MAKE A MIGHTY WARRIOR ONE DAY, YOUNG ONE. But perhaps you should exercise caution: these Midgardians are not equipped for our strength!” He nods along eagerly and hollers “To battle!” with a fist-pump, and then Thor and him disappear into the kitchen.

Jane stares, wide-eyed, after them.

Darcy grins and says “The apple really doesn’t fall far from the apple tree, huh? Hey, do you think Clint’s got one? I’d pay good money to see that.”

That’s about the time that some young girl with really red hair—like _really_ red, super-red, the reddest red in a world of red—approaches Jane with a toddler in her arms, and hands him over to Jane with a tentative smile, and then goes to try to keep some other kid with long, dark hair from jumping off the edge of the couch.

Darcy leaves Jane to her motherly duties (seriously, she should’ve seen this coming, dating the God of Thunder and Abs and L’Oreal Commercials) and goes to see if they’ve got any popcorn up in here, because this is brilliant and she’s never leaving the tower again if it means she gets to play witness in all of this. It’s reasons like this she is _so_ glad she agreed to work for Jane. This shit is way more fun than PoliSci. (And her professors told her she wasn’t ambitious enough to go anywhere in life. Suck on that!)

Darcy only just got here with Jane, and she gets the feeling they’re going to be staying for quite awhile. Scuttlebutt is, SHIELD moved the kids in to Avengers tower in the middle of the day, and none of the Avengers were around to see it, or to protest, because they were off saving New York and whatnot. She thinks it’s absolutely brilliant in an underhanded, sneaky sort of way. Apparently Fury has been refusing to give a word of explanation so far, just left the kids here, like a whole baby-on-the-doorstep thing, like Harry Potter, which is _awesome._

Most of the Avengers seem pretty pissed off about the whole ordeal, though.

Captain Blond-Hair-Blue-Eyes-Abs is nowhere to be found, but Clint is staking out the top of the refrigerator with his bow and arrow and guarding his poptart stash, Natasha The Scary One is sharpening her knives in a corner and watching the red-red-red-haired girl without moving her head, and Bruce is sipping tea and teaching the twins how to do the trick with the forks and the toothpick and _that is so cool,_ seriously, how do people discover this stuff? Because she imagines lighting a toothpick on fire in the middle of a restaurant wouldn’t end well, but then again, she didn’t think tasing a God that fell from the sky, yelling “HAMMER? HAMMER?” was a good idea, and that turned out great. Seriously, she doesn’t regret a moment. It’s awesome.

Of course, that’s about the time Fury comes stomping in, like the angry-scary man that he is (seriously, why’s he gotta be so angry? and scary? like, all the time, it’s probably the eyepatch) and yells at them all to calm down and gather before he starts kicking ass and taking names (only he doesn’t say it that way, but it’s totally what he means. Darcy knows these things.)

It takes a good ten minutes, but the Avengers assemble (ha!) in the living room, with all their little ducklings in a row, and Darcy puts a hand over her mouth to keep from bursting out laughing and running to find a camera. (Oh, she will definitely have pictures soon enough. Many, many pictures. Tumblr will love her forever.)

Stark joins them last, coming out from his hidey-hole, looking positively infuriated at Fury. (Get it? She really cracks herself up.)

Fury glares daggers into all of them, and Darcy is so very, very happy that she’s just a PoliSci major that gets to hang around with a bunch of crazy super heroes and Gods and rage monsters and pirates (Fury is totally a pirate, he is, it’s the eyepatch, she can’t help it) and her life _rocks._

“Here’s the situation,” he growls and crosses his arms, and there’s a girl that mirrors his stance exactly, and isn’t that just kind of cute, he has a little shadow, and she’s—okay, yeah, is it possible for someone to be scarier than Nick Fury? Because if it wasn’t before, it is now, _holy shit_ that girl knows how to glare, probably because she looks just like Fury and oh my god, she’s totally his clone, or something, or–or–or—

“SHIELD has determined that they,” he gestures sharply to the children without looking at any of them, “know too much. I don’t know how, and I don’t wanna know how, but they have insider information about the Avengers and SHIELD, and this poses quite a big damn problem for us.”

“We would never—” the red-red-red-haired one starts, but then quiets and sits a little straighter, her hands resting primly on her thighs and not a single hair (it’s so red, oh my god, it can’t be real) is out of place.

“Be that as it may,” Fury seems to acknowledge her, “they cannot be released into general population.”

“Oh, like that was ever an option,” Stark snarks, and oh, that rhymes, isn’t that cool? Stark snarks, he’s Mr. Stark the Snarker, Stark’s got the Snark up to here, every day he’s Snarking it, oh that is just a goldmine.

Fury’s good eye twitches at that, and he pauses for dramatic effect because he’s a scary-angry man that likes to be scary and angry and a pirate, and then says “The only other option is to bring them back to SHIELD,” both Bruce and Stark start to protest, loudly, along with one of the older kids that just adorable looking, with that weird hair that sticks up, but Fury cuts them off with a glare. He’s really got the glaring thing down. He should offer lessons, because you’d think a guy with one eye wouldn’t be that good at glaring, he’s only got half the power, but he _is_ which means he must be doubly good at glaring, right?

“But quite frankly, I don’t want to deal with it.”

“Director—” the Captain starts, and Darcy says _‘oh Captain, my Captain’_ in her head because how can she not, she does it like every time, it’s a thing, like how every time Thor moves and his hair swishes she thinks of the L’Oreal commercials, and he should really talk to someone about doing commercials.

“Not a word, Rogers,” Fury cuts him off, which is strange because Darcy thought he had a soft spot for the Captain, but whatever, everyone has bad days. “Until further notice, the children,” how is it he can do that? Say one word but really mean another? Because he totally sounds like he’s saying _‘foreign operatives of undetermined threat value’_ and not _‘children’._ “are to remain here. I’m doubling the security, though I don’t think it’ll help,” he gives a pointed look to the little girl with bright, bright blue eyes, how are they that bright? It’s like, lite-bright blue, electricity blue, impossible-in-nature blue. “And this doesn’t get you out of saving the world now and again, Barton.” Clint looks crestfallen, and Darcy rolls her eyes because he totally loves shooting shit, it’s not even funny.

“Questions?” Before anyone gets so much as a peep in, he’s talking over them with a “Good. Don’t call me. I’m not your damn babysitter.” And then he turns toward the exit, and makes some sort of grunting sound that must mean something to the girl, and she manages to look intimidating when she shares a nod with the eldest boy of the children and turns, following Fury out. _That_ is a match made in heaven right there, if Darcy’s ever seen it. That girl is going to make a brilliant SHIELD director one day. All she needs is the eyepatch. Darcy fears for them all.

“Well, shit,” Clint says dumbly, and then one of the middle kids shouts gleefully “SWEARING!” and then Darcy grins as all hell breaks loose again.


	15. Chapter 15

Kennedy doesn’t really understand why Peter keeps insisting that she refer to them by their first names, because no one here understands her, anyway. After a week back here in the tower, it’s getting on her nerves, quite frankly. The one time she’d walked up to Thor and politely asked where the kitchen was, since she isn’t familiar with this floor’s layout, he’d stared blankly at her, patted her on the head, and walked away.

She’d huffed and wandered off to find the kitchen herself, got herself a glass of milk, and then retreated to the room with the rest of her brothers and sisters. She makes sure to do the secret knock, a quick _tap tap tap thud_ , and then Claire lets her in and motions for her to be quiet. She nods, trying not to wake some of the younger kids that are down for their afternoon nap, and makes her way to the adjoining room they’ve designated for the waking area.

They’re allowed to go into other parts of the tower, but they generally like to stick together, and so a lot of their time is spent in the ‘play room’, as her brother keeps calling it.

But there’s nothing to _do_ here. Sure, it’s great for some of the younger kids—which she very much _is not_ —with the coloring books and toys and puzzles and such that d— _Tony_ —procured yesterday. And as much as she complains, Peter just keeps telling her to deal with it, because they can’t afford to do anything that would make them seem untrustworthy right now. Their status here is tentative.

She huffs as she throws herself into a bean bag and pulls one of the stuffed animals to her chest, burying her nose in it and remembering the one her dad had given to her, just before the siege. It was an electric blue tiger, and dad had spent the hour car ride back from the zoo that it’s ridiculous to offer unrealistically colored animals as toys to children because then it’s just setting them up for disappointment when they realize that no, tigers don’t actually come in that color.

But she loved that thing, carried it with her everywhere, not just because it was her favorite color but because it reminded her of daddy, of the blue that was theirs to share, and theirs alone. She lost it at the start of the siege—they all lost things, but even though she knows material objects aren’t important, it still hurt.

She’s a genius, but she’s only six. She misses her stuffed animal.

Before she starts sniffing, she stands up and huffs, stomping out of the room and kicking aside the toys littering the ground. They’re toys for _babies_ , and she’s been here for a whole week and her fingers are itching for something to _do._ She stalks right past Claire, who seems a little worried that Kennedy is taking off so quickly, but she’s always been the fastest one of their group, and she signs a quick *I’m okay* before she slips out.

She doesn’t know where her feet take her, but she winds up outside the doors to her d— _Tony’s—_ workshop. It’s dark inside, so Tony is probably somewhere else right now, and she only wants a little while, just to remember what metal feels like against her fingers, and the smell of motor oil, and the sound of a sparking circuit board.

She blows out a breath and frowns, because the key pad isn’t recognizing her code, and—of course. Because she doesn’t really exist in this world, does she? So her code wouldn’t work because Tony had never needed to give her a code, because Tony isn’t—

She shakes her head, wondering what she’s going to do. She can’t keep sitting and pretending she’s content with a bunch of puzzles and coloring books. She’s going to go crazy, and then they’ll probably kick her out, and she’ll have to go away and leave the others, and she doesn’t want that to happen.

Really, it’s best for everyone if she gets in here.

A thought hits her then, and she doubts herself, because when the _tinea_ had finally reached the core processors for the house, she thought he was lost forever, but maybe…

*JARVIS* she signs quickly, looking upwards. It takes a moment, and she’s about to give up, but then the familiar, British voice responds “Yes, master Kennedy?” and she smiles so wide that her cheeks hurt. She hadn’t realized how much she missed JARVIS until now, and just knowing that he exists here, too, makes it feel a little like home. And he knows her.

He knows who she is.

*Can you let me in?* she tries next, and there’s another pause before any response. She thinks it’s because this JARVIS isn’t quite as tuned-in to her language as the other one was, but it works all the same, and the door hisses open as the lights click on.

Then, she’s just like a kid in a candy store, running straight towards the first heap of metal she can reach. The layout is a bit different than she remembers, and the technology seems a bit simple to her, but it’s right about her level of understanding, anyway.

After she’s seen absolutely everything, and touched everything, and she’s starting to smell like motor oil and metal already, she hauls herself up onto one of the tables and starts tapping away at the holographic display. The system seems a bit old, but she knows how to use it, and she loses track of time when she finally gets around to finishing up one of the projects already laid out on the table.

She’ll have to deconstruct it and put it back exactly as it was before she leaves, but just the process of finishing something, and working with her hands again, the numbers running through her mind, lulls her into a sense of security so convincing that this almost feels like home.

She doesn’t quite notice when her hands slow, and her eyes droop, and she lets herself curl up on the table with her hand still wrapped around the completed arc-powered engine, humming and whirring as it glows with that same, familiar blue—their blue.


	16. Chapter 16

Tony suspects something is off when he walks down to his workshop and the lights are on. “JARVIS?” he asks, suspiciously, and doesn’t go to walk in just yet. “Status report.”

“Of course, sir,” JARVIS says, as if he he doesn’t think Tony should be as worried as he is. “The lab was opened by an authorized user exactly five-point-six-three hours ago, sir. Occupant is still inside. She appears to be asleep.”

Which, okay, that’s just weird. Because the only female ‘authorized user’ that he knows of is Pepper, and if Pepper is asleep in his lab, that just—well, it doesn’t make any sense, and it also isn’t possible, because he talked to Pepper on the phone just an hour ago. She’s wrapping up something with Stark Industries and then she’s coming over to see what all the fuss is about, and why Tony is maybe sort of freaking out, and she’s probably going to tear him apart for allowing himself in the vicinity of children.

He walks in, and then things just get weirder, because it isn’t Pepper in his lab, it’s the little girl—the one that he first saw when he came to, after that fight with the slugs and the thing with his arc reactor—and she’s—

“Um, JARVIS,” he questions, because there is a tiny girl curled up on his work table, sleeping like the dead, one arm curled around what looks to be one of his arc engines that’s been giving him trouble except it’s— “Did she _build that?”_

“Yes, sir,” JARVIS answers with something that sounds like…pride? Okay, this is just…really strange. Because she’s a little girl, and JARVIS recognizes her as an ‘authorized user’ and she’s intelligent enough to finish building an engine that even _he_ was struggling with, and she has these eyes that just seem to _glow,_ and—

“JARVIS, call Pepper, call Pepper right now, this is—I don’t even know what to do, do you have any idea what to do? Because who’s the genius billionaire playboy philanthropist here? How can I not know what to do? I should be able to, I don’t know, throw money at it, or engineer a solution, or–or–okay, this isn’t working. What do I–” he cuts off because the little girl shifts sleepily, her hand flopping around the engine, her hair the same dark color as his mother’s, and she’s just so–

“Oh,” he says softly. “JARVIS, end the call.”

“I never started, sir,” JARVIS informs him, because of course he didn’t, he gets it, he always gets it, he’s the most advanced AI in the world and Tony built him. He knows.

Tony sighs, runs a ragged hand through his hair, and tries to figure out what to do. He suspected, of course. A bunch of children from an alternate universe just pop up in your tower, and they seem to know everything about you? He’d known there was more than just what Peter told them, but he hadn’t been time to give it any more thought, because Fury had whisked them away to SHIELD. Even in the week the kids have been back at the tower, things were too hectic to think much of anything. They had Jane and Darcy arriving from New Mexico, and Steve was pulling his hair out because Fury dumped them with the kids and refused to contact them until now, and the whole thing was botched and rushed and completely exhausting. He didn’t have time to think about who the kids were. Or maybe that’s just what he’d been trying to convince himself...

But there’s a difference between knowing something has a pretty strong likelihood of being true, and actually _seeing_ it. Because in all Tony’s years, he can honestly say the last thing he expected to see is a little girl with his mother’s hair and the mind of a Stark. Tony never planned to have children. He’s having a hard enough time imagining a universe where he would have children, let alone dealing with the _result_ of that universe. Who is asleep in his workshop with a finished arc engine glowing softly next to her.

He asks JARVIS just in case—there’s a 99.84% chance that he’s right, of course, but for the sake of thoroughness… “She’s mine, isn’t she?” He asks quietly, so she won’t hear him. He’d programmed JARVIS to accept any ‘authorized user’ with DNA similar enough to his to be an immediate relation. He’d always thought the only time it would apply to anyone but him would be if he had some illegitimate half-sibling, or some super villain decided to clone him, or, well…

He didn’t expect this, but here it is.

“Yes, sir,” JARVIS answers, almost reverently, and then falls into silence. Tony gives himself a moment to breathe, surprised by exactly how much he’s _not_ freaking out, and is about to leave when JARVIS tells him that Nick Fury is here (again), and requests his presence in the main living room. He rolls his eyes, because Fury has the best timing, honestly, give the man a medal.

And then, before he thinks at all about what he’s doing, he walks forward and gently scoops the little girl up, trying not to wake her (because he can’t imagine any universe where waking up to Nick Fury is a desired outcome) as he heads toward the elevator.

To his credit, he manages not to freak out until Fury is long gone, and the sleeping little girl has been passed off to Peter without a word, and he’s safely locked into his own room, knowing he’s going to have to tell the others at some point in the very near future.

He leans over the edge of his bed, ducks his head down into his hands, and breathes deep and quick until JARVIS starts inquiring about his health. He waves a hand around and says “I’m fine, I’m fine, just,” he laughs “Jesus.”

Of all the things he expected to see as a superhero, as a genius, as a billionaire, as a human being, he can honestly say he didn’t expect to see the children of the Avengers, running around the tower like they owned the place, slowly rebuilding the home they lost, with the doppelgängers of their parents scrambling to keep up.

He’s pretty sure he needs to meet his alternate self and punch the guy out, because no way _in any universe_ was this a good idea. No fucking way.

Just so long as it wouldn’t change things.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> QUESTION FOR MY READERS:
> 
> I'm thinking about going back through and making Kennedy deaf, not just unable to speak. I think it would work better with where I'm going with this. The only reason it ended up as it has is because of my indecisiveness when I started. Opinions? Other ideas?
> 
> (Just comment wherever, I read every comment I receive, and try to reply to most all of them.)

“ _Mister_ Stark,” Pepper snaps into the phone. It’s her twenty-third message to Tony and she is done playing games. There was that horrible blurb on the news—coming in with over a two week time delay—about another fight downtown which the Avengers so eloquently handled, except for when they showed Tony falling right into some black pit of space and disappearing.

She’s been worried sick, but now she’s just angry. She finally gave up and called Bruce, who informed her that yes, Tony is alive and well, and she hung up before he could get another word out. Now she’s on her way to the tower, having cut her business trip to India short, and she is _not_ happy.

“Were you aware,” she drawls on sardonically, “that I have been convinced you were dead for _three days?_ You don’t call, you don’t answer your calls, your friends don’t answer their calls… What am I supposed to think?”

There’s a flurry of motion as she strides into the tower, waving away the security personnel and secretaries and construction crew—which she does not want to know about, thank you—and she doesn’t stop until she reaches the elevator. She punches in her security code, has JARVIS take her directly to the living quarters (which change so frequently that they never have a set floor) and taps her foot impatiently.

“You are going to wish you were dead momentarily. You see, if you could be _bothered_ to pick up your phone, you would certainly already know that I’m about, oh,” she looks at her watch, then at the elevator numbers as they rise “three minutes away from pushing you off this tower. _Do not take this lightly,_ ” she presses on as the door dings open and she steps into some kind of chaos, ignoring the other Avengers as she stalks her way through.

“I don’t care if you’re gravely injured, or imprisoned, or if Steve Jobs has risen from the dead to taunt you mercilessly with his superior music technology. There is not a _single_ thing that could possibly convince me you have a legitimate reason for avoiding my—”

_“Mom?”_

Pepper drops the phone.


	18. Chapter 18

_Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit RUN._ She does. No one tries to stop her. She locks herself in one of the unused bedrooms and sinks down against the door, trying to catch her breath.

It just slipped out. She didn’t think it would just happen like that. She thought she’d have time to prepare, to make sure she tried out the name _‘Pepper’_ a few times so that she could do this. Hell, she didn’t even know if this universe had a Pepper. Not until now.

Peter is going to be angry. They all promised they wouldn’t do this. No tip-offs. Let them figure it out themselves, if they ever did. No pressure. This universe is not their own. These people are not their parents. Their parents are dead.

Mom is dead.

Claire pulls viciously at her hair—amber, just a shade darker than mom’s—and tries to stop herself from breathing. Breathing will only make her cry. She doesn’t want to cry. She’s in too much trouble right now to cry.

What if Pepper doesn’t want her? What if— No, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what Pepper thinks because Pepper isn’t Mom. Mom loved her and spent three hours trying to learn how to french braid her hair and took her shopping for her first pair of heels and turned into Rescue just to try to save them from the _tinea_ , from the end of the world, from the grief that threatens to drown her, and she can’t.

She bites down hard on her lip and shakes until her breathing slows, and her eyes clear up, and she keeps herself from crying. She can do this. She can pretend it was all just some kind of mistake and—

“Claire?”

Peter. She should’ve known he’d never—

“Claire, come out here, please.”

He doesn’t sound angry. He doesn’t even sound annoyed. He sounds…sympathetic. Gentle. Maybe he really does understand. Maybe he gets it. Gets that she just…couldn’t help it. It’s been over a year since she’s seen so much as a picture of her mother and now…

Everything is different now.

“We’re going to…talk,” he says slowly, the inflection in his voice muffled by the door. “All of us,” he clarifies. “Us and the Avengers and…and Pepper. We owe them that, Claire.” Claire draws in a shaky breath and uncurls from her place on the floor. They do owe them. For taking them in. For giving them a place to live after they’ve spent so long running.

She rolls her shoulders and then her neck, straightens out the wrinkles in her blouse and pants. They’re still stiff enough from the store that they spring right back to form. There’s no cold water to splash in her face, but it shouldn’t matter because she hasn’t been crying. She pats her cheeks firmly a few times and then sucks in a breath and holds it before opening the door.

Peter stands on the other side, looking at her with a strange mix of compassion and understanding, and says “Come on, kid.” She no longer bristles at the endearment, just follows Peter back toward the main room on this floor, where everyone sits on and around the furniture.

She’s almost surprised to see the way they’ve stopped grouping themselves by kids and adults. The twins are sitting on either side of Bruce, playing patty-cake quietly over his lap while he stares, dumbfounded. Jane is leaning against Thor with Mo in her lap, and even if she does look terrified and at her wit’s end, she seems happy, too. Kennedy is sitting next to Tony on the end of the couch, swinging her legs off the end and occasionally reaching over to tap at things on the tablet Tony’s holding.

She doesn’t look at Pepper.

Claire situates herself with the rest of the kids, all squished together on one of the couches, and Sammy immediately shifts to put an arm around her shoulders. She doesn’t want to appear weak to these people, but she can’t deny the comfort right now, and Sammy always knows how to keep her grounded.

Peter is standing so that he faces most of the group, and she feels bad that he has to be the one to do all of this, but he’s their leader. She can’t imagine anyone else trying to do what he’s done in this past year. Even Mara couldn’t have done it, and she’s only a year younger than him.

She sees the way he steels his expression just before he starts. His eyes scan their group evenly, faltering only twice. His voice is calm and even when he speaks. “We haven’t been completely honest with you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also really short. Sorry! My next few chapters seem to be on the shorter side, but I promise they will get longer and I will not wait a million years to post the short ones.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry (belated) Christmas! :)

“So what you’re saying,” Clint starts slowly, and everyone groans because this is at least the third or fourth time he’s said this in the past half hour. He doesn’t care, he wants some damn clarification, because he’s having just a _little_ trouble believing. “Is that you–” Clint points a finger at Peter, and then circles it around to encompass the rest of the children. “–are _our_ kids. From another universe.”

Peter nods. He’s the ringleader of their little posse, and Clint doesn’t quite know if he trusts the guy. Tasha is still pretending this is all just going to go away, but Clint doesn’t work like that. He’s trying to move past it, and see how it is that Tony and Bruce can trust these kids wholeheartedly, but he knows almost as well as Tash how dangerous kids can be. He grew up in the circus.

“But see,” Clint says with a frown and a titch of excitement in his voice, “That can’t be possible. Because you’re, what, eighteen? Nineteen?”

Peter says “Sixteen,” without so much as blinking, and Clint cringes, because shit, this kid is young. They’re all so young, and from what he understands of it, they’ve spent the last year or so fighting for their lives. He can’t imagine that’s something anyone needs to go through, much less a bunch of kids that just lost their parents.

He’s maybe starting to see Tony’s point.

“Okay, sixteen,” he repeats with a wave of his hand. “My point is, you’re whose kid?”

Peter shifts uncomfortably and stares at the ceiling, and Clint sighs. The one thing none of these kids will tell them is who their parents are. Clint’s been trying to wheedle it out of them for the better part of an hour now, but Peter keeps toeing the party line and saying he doesn’t want their presence here to influence the way the Avengers end up in this universe.

As if they haven’t already made everything pear-shaped just by appearing. He doesn’t think knowing who, exactly, the Hulk ends up sticking his beanstalk into is going to fuck things up anymore than they have been already. But it’s not like they don’t see it, anyway. He’ll eat his own arm if the red-haired girl isn’t either related to Natasha or Pepper, but he’s hoping for the latter because Natasha might actually cut a bitch if the kid is hers.

And judging by the new little friend Tony’s made, he’s willing to wager that Tony’s seen something in the little girl that clued him in, because he’s been woefully unsurprised since the beginning. The thought of Tony having a kid alone is enough to deal with, he doesn’t want to think about if any of these little spawns are _his._

“Okay, but my point,” he repeats, after sort of spacing for a moment. “You’re sixteen. We’re–” he looks around at each of the Avengers, slightly puzzled, and narrows his eyes. “Well, with the exception of Tony, I think it’s safe to say we’re all pretty young.”

“Hey!” Tony cries indignantly, but he doesn’t really do anything about it. He just grumbles about not being that old—and he isn’t, really, but he’s maybe the only one here that was old enough to physically have kids sixteen years ago, which is his point.

“ _My point is,_ ” he cuts in, “Cap over here was basically in diapers when you were born,” he gestures to Peter, whose mouth twitches but doesn’t smile. Steve, on the other hand, finally breaks. His motions are measured and calm, but Clint can see the tension vibrating through his frame as he stands, refusing to look at any of them, and walks out of the room.

“Oka-ay,” Clint drawls slowly, blinking after the hallway Steve just disappeared down. He’s probably going to beat the hell out of that punching bag again. He’s been down in the gym more than he’s been everywhere else. He thinks Steve’s taken to sleeping down there.

Before Clint can comment further on Steve’s behavior, the little girl that was asleep in Tony’s arms just an hour ago scrambles up from her seat. She huffs, pats Peter on the knee, and then marches right up to Clint and stares him down with eyes that seem to glow. A chill hits the back of his neck right before she starts doing something with her hands.

It looks like sign language, honestly, but it’s sure as hell not ASL, or even anything Clint’s seen before, and when she finishes with a couple of forceful fists to her palm, he just blinks a few times and says “Uh, what?”

She basically _seethes_ at this, and honestly, she’s quite a pistol for a little girl that’s hardly even hit the age of reason, but he supposes he understands what Stark sees in her, and why it’s kind of easy to assume they’re related. Her mind is so advanced that it almost makes sense that she seems much more like an angry teenager than a little kid.

Peter opens his mouth to say something, but she flicks a sign back at him and he shuts his mouth. She huffs a little and shoots Clint a glare, and then she signs again, only looking at the ceiling, and then JARVIS says “Of course, young miss,” and well, _that’s_ creepy.

And then she starts signing again, looking at Clint, only this time JARVIS speaks for her. It’s…kind of weird, to be honest.

“Young Miss Kennedy,” so _that’s_ her name, “would like me to tell you that one, you are an idiot.” Clint barely gets out a mock protest before JARVIS talks over him, and honestly, he’s biased already, what is this? “And two, that the standing theory of the multiverse regards timelines as relative and not parallel, and that the Young Miss’ parents were both of age when they agreed to have her, and when they adopted her brother. Young Miss would also like me to inform you,” JARVIS pauses, and Kennedy smirks, and it’s _terrifying_ how well they work together, “that Uncle Barton,” Clint’s eyes widen in shock. _Uncle?_ “was also of age when he decided to have his kids.”

Oh. Oh, shit. Did she just— Oh, hell no. He cannot deal with this. He doesn’t have children. He can’t—who is it? Which one is his? Which one—oh, no no no. She said kids. She said _kids,_ plural, multiple, oh god, he has kids. Or another him had kids, and now they’re here, they’re in this room, they’re probably looking right at him and shouldn’t he know who they are? Shouldn’t he be able to tell? Isn’t that just par for the course with parents? Maybe he’s a bad father. No, not him, the other him. It’s not him. It’s a different Clint. A strange, evil twin brother Clint that thought it would be a good idea to have kids at some point and oh, hell no, he isn’t equipped to deal with this.

Peter yanks Kennedy backward and holds her hands, which is probably the equivalent of covering her mouth, and she shoots a very sophisticated little glare at her brother but then rolls her eyes and settles down, and Peter is apologizing, and Stark just looks gleeful and proud, like he’s just seen what one of his inventions can do only it’s more than that, it’s different, and he’s looking at Kennedy and—oh. _Oh._

Oh, this is not good.

Because Tony is smiling at his not-quite-daughter, and Bruce has been wandering around with a giant grin plastered to his face, and Thor has started letting some of the children climb on him like a jungle gym, praising them for their “valor” and talking about training them to be “mighty Midgardian warriors” and even Tasha is starting to look a little less homicidal, and—

And then one of the little girls hits him in the forehead with a lego, and he rubs at it, still trying to recover, glaring at the giggling toddler who thinks it’s just _hilarious_ that she managed to…to…

To hit Clint smack-dab in the middle of the forehead. With a lego. That she threw. From what must be ten feet away.

Okay, he’s definitely not equipped to handle this.


	20. Chapter 20

Steve…isn’t handling this well. But he doesn’t know how any of the rest of the Avengers are handling this at all. He doesn’t understand them anymore.

Steve knows he’s not perfect, despite what the media thinks. He’s seen too many flaws in the mirror, and he’s let too many people down—Peggy, Bucky—to call himself a hero when everyone else says he is. But the one thing he’s always prided himself on is his ability to lead, to keep a team together until they do what’s expected of them; until they do what’s best for the people.

And now, staring at his team, he doesn’t see a team anymore. These aren’t the people that he’s been saving the world with for the past year. They’re…different. Changed. Taking unnecessary risks just because a couple of kids show up…

He can’t explain it, but it makes him angry. So angry that it’s beyond help. They’re supposed to be fighters. They’re supposed to protect the city of New York, protect America, protect the people of the world that have done nothing wrong. They’re supposed to be the last line of defense.

They’re not supposed to be _babysitters._

He doesn’t understand Fury’s lack of judgment in this. Steve would never have released these children back to the Avengers. It doesn’t make any tactical sense for them to be here. They’re a liability, and they’re distracting the team from what they need to be doing. It should be as simple as that.

Already, these kids have bullied their way into the tower, into the Avengers’ lives, into their good graces. Steve doesn’t like bullies. He doesn’t trust any of them, and he doesn’t understand how Stark can. Stark, who never trusts a soul.

And another thing. What’s happening to Stark? The man has never given half a hoot about anyone but himself since the day he was born. The man’s heart is literally made of iron. He has no soul. So how is it that this little girl is suddenly changing him so profoundly?

Sitting there in that room today, watching as Peter explained that the Avengers should somehow feel responsible for them because of something that happened with their parents in some other universe? It all sounds too uncertain. It sounds like a manipulation. And his team had just waited, listened, and taken it at face value. No questions asked. If this were the 40s, half the room would’ve been screaming about Nazi sleeper agents by now. It just doesn’t sit right with him.

And Peter just flashed that knowing grin, the one that makes Steve’s stomach turn over and tie itself in knots. Stark had eaten it up. Reveled in it, almost. That gentle, apologetic smile he’d shot at Miss Potts in the middle of their discussion. The way his hand rested on the little girl’s back, right between her shoulder blades, protective.

Something fierce and angry roars up from deep within Steve’s gut, and he can feel the heat of flames licking at the back of his mind, sitting on the tip of his tongue. Something about the way Stark’s entire demeanor shifted, the lines of tension ebbing away, the way that girl echoes his appearance in so many ways…

Every time he sees them together, bent over one of those small computers, planning and gesticulating and smiling, his heart ratchets up into his throat, pumping wildly, and his fists clench at his sides. He can’t explain it. He doesn’t know what it is he keeps feeling, every time he sees Stark and that girl together. His mind just flashes through images of Stark—another Stark, from this kid’s universe—taking some pretty girl home. Making room for her in his heart and his life when Steve has always been so convinced he’s already too full of himself. Building himself a family in another world, smiling like that all the time.

It burns inside his chest, every time he thinks about it, so he shuts it down. He doesn’t know what it is, but it feels dangerous. He doesn’t trust it. So he shuts it down, buries it deep, and learns to keep his distance. He escapes to the gym. He spends long hours there, going through punching bag after punching bag, breaking only for food and sleep. He keeps odd hours, avoids community areas.

He’s not going to let whatever these kids have done to Stark affect him, too. He can’t afford to be compromised. He needs to keep a clear head long enough to figure out why these kids have this strange effect on him, and what their true purpose here is. Fury and Stark and Banner may have let their guard down, and the rest may be waning, but he won’t sway.

They’re all blinded by the news that they have children, now. Not theirs, maybe not even children; for all they know they could be sleeper agents or some kind of futuristic invention. But they’re letting the situation get the best of them, losing their objectivity. He sees each of them softening, trusting these kids without rhyme or reason to.

That same hot, vicious feeling flares up again, and he pushes it back down and pounds another few rounds of punches into the bag until the chain snaps, and it flies across the room.

So what if his alternate self apparently decided not to have children? What’s it to him, anyway? It isn’t his life; not his concern. Maybe the absence of a kid with his blond hair or his particular shade of blue eyes is a good thing. No, it definitely is. He can remain objective. Keep his distance so that when something goes wrong, he’ll be there for his team. When they’ve all let themselves fall victim to this…this _plague,_ these aliens, he’ll be there to pick up the pieces. He’ll be there to bring them all together again and remind them why they’re here in the first place.

Steve is a soldier. He’s always been a soldier, even when the army denied him time and time again. He won’t let these intruders skew his focus. He won’t lose sight of his mission.

He won’t lose his team to this. More importantly, he can’t.


	21. Chapter 21

“Section M-4A, third level! Go, go, go!”

Mara sprints down the hallway in flickering light, the scent of burning drywall and molten metal filling her lungs. The air is hazy with smoke, dust, and ash, and as her feet pound against the unsteady floor, the sounds of the other SHIELD agents fades behind her. She’s far ahead of the others, ducking into small passageways that most of the other agents can’t fit through. She knows this building better than nearly everyone; spent her younger years exploring the maze of tunnels and hallways carved into the ground when this base was first built.

Her steady breaths echo in her ear, impossibly loud in the muted haze of ash and rubble. They’ve had “anomalies” popping up all over the building in the last few weeks, and she’s only just slipped from Fury’s watch dogs and procured some weapons. As much as she understands Fury’s reluctance to use her skills and put her out in the field, she can be of use here. She’s been trained for this.

She has to know if these “anomalies” are what she thinks they are.

She feels a certain buzzing in the floor and in the air, vibrations shivering through the entire building, and it’s too familiar. This is no coincidence. It’s exactly as she told Peter. It’s the reason she chose to stay at SHIELD, besides the proximity to Fury. She needs to ascertain the threat level in this universe. So that this time, they’ll have a better chance at surviving.

She turns the corner, and in the split-second before instinct kicks in, before she empties her clip into the black, ugly thing filling the hallway, there’s a bone-deep fear coursing through her, because they are not safe. They may never be safe. They could die before they ever know what ‘safe’ feels like.

She pops in a spare magazine and just keeps firing, firing until the empty clicks are all she has left. There’s no need; she’s killed it. But she can’t stop. Her fingers shake and her heart flutters in her chest, lungs straining for air that doesn’t smell of death, and even when the other SHIELD agents come pounding up behind her, she keeps firing the empty clip at the black mass.

It isn’t until Fury himself closes a hand over her own, pushing her hands and the gun down to her side, that she stops firing. She takes three deep, controlled breaths, and forces her hands to stop shaking. She rebuilds her calm exterior, letting the hardened steel of emotionlessness reflect from her skin. She has training for this. She shouldn’t be slipping up. It isn’t the first time she’s dealt with this. She knows the ways of warfare.

“Do I even need to ask what this thing is?” Fury says beside her, voice gruff, as they both stare down at the deformed carcass. Like a cicada with spider’s legs, and a thousand times as large. It’s grotesque.

Mara shakes her head slowly, knowing that by now, she’s covered any traces of post-traumatic stress well enough to avoid another trip to the SHIELD psychologist. The venom in her voice is subtle, laced with an underlining fury so strong that only those that hold the same name can truly understand it. _“Tinea.”_

And so it starts again.


	22. Chapter 22

Jane can pinpoint the exact day when her life took a turn for the strange and unimaginable, but it doesn’t help any. It’s not as if there’s a handbook for falling in love with a Norse God who moonlights as a superhero and a L’Oreal model, as Darcy always says. Or something to that degree. But she still has her work, even if she’s had to move her entire research facility to the forests of upstate New York.

Because suddenly, she’s a mother. Of sorts.

As much as she thinks they’re wonderful, she never signed up for this. Mac is eight, and he has a “strong, warrior’s heart” and he’s so full of energy that Jane sometimes wonders if Thor zaps him with lightning to charge him up. (“It’s not outside the realm of possibility,” Darcy comments. “WHAT IS THIS ‘POSSIBILITY’? IS IT OF THE NINE REALMS? I HAVE NOT HEARD OF IT.”)

And Mo is about to turn three, and he’s a lovely little boy, and he has Jane’s disposition, according to Darcy, which startles her quite a bit. But he toddles around, eyes full of wonder, and both Mac and Thor coddle him, even if Thor’s idea of coddling is _not_ dropping him when he takes him out for a little fly around the city. (“Ohoho, little one, perhaps you are more suited for ground battle!”)

And it helps having Darcy around. When Jane inquired, once, about when she was expected to go back now that she’s gotten her college credits, she’d just laughed. (“Go back? Please! I know too much. We’re living in a spy movie. I’m a SHIELD recruit now. I’m working on a code name. I’m thinking it should have something to do with tasers.”)

But still, Jane can’t help thinking that she never asked for this. All her life, she’s worked toward expanding astrophysics, discovering something that could help change the world. She found that change in Thor, who’s helping to save the world, and her work involving the bifröst is unparalleled so far. But all of this happened because she wanted it to. It happened because of her drive, her desire for scientific discovery, her passion for her work.

But Mac and Mo? It feels almost as if they just…fell into her lap. And she can’t help but have a problem with that, simply because she’s grown up learning that nothing comes for free. She’s worked for everything she’s ever received or achieved, except for these kids. So then doesn’t that make her the weak link? Doesn’t that mean she’s unworthy of being a part of these boys’ lives? They deserve to be raised by someone stronger than her, someone that isn’t so consumed by her work, someone that wants to dedicate their life to children, not someone that needs to split that kind of dedication with her work.

“You seem troubled, dear Jane,” Thor says, and Jane jumps a little in her seat. Her tea has gone cold, and she hasn’t gotten much work done despite the myriad files spread around her like confetti. She still isn’t used to living in Avengers tower when she isn’t at the research facility up north, but she’s gotten comfortable enough here to use the common areas whenever she needs a moment to think.

Jane sweeps a stack of papers to the floor and pats the seat next to her. Thor throws himself down, and the whole couch shakes and creaks. She smiles, but it doesn’t feel as genuine as it should.

“Are you not happy?” Thor asks, studying her face with single-minded intensity that used to make her shiver from head to toe.

“I’m—” she stops and frowns, setting her teacup down on the small table next to the couch. She decides to borrow Thor’s word, “–troubled.”

“What troubles you?” Thor inquires gently, and his arm wraps around her. She lets him pull her close, and curls against his body, already surprisingly familiar. “Have I done something to displease you?”

“No, no!” she says quickly, patting at his chest. “It’s not you. You’re perfect.” Quite literally, too, she thinks as her fingers graze his pecs. She still feels like a giggly fangirl every time she sees him and realizes that he is a _god,_ he is a _hero,_ and he is _hers._

“Then…” Thor pauses, considering, “the new York?”

She bites her lips against a giggle at the way he says it, like it’s not _‘New York’_ but just a newer version of _‘York’_. “No,” she shakes her head. “Surprisingly, upstate New York has quite a lot of astrological activity, and besides, most of my work is theoretical anyway.” Not all of it, not anymore, not that she minds.

“Then it is the young ones,” Thor states definitively, and Jane sighs.

“It’s just—” She doesn’t bother finishing her sentence, shaking her head and wondering what it is that she could possibly say that won’t make her sound somehow belligerent toward these kids. She’s _not._ It’s not their fault for being here, or losing their parents, or any of it. It’s not even their fault that she’s having trouble with this, with being a mother all of the sudden, when they deserve their _real_ parents, back in their own universe, and this whole thing is just…a mess. She sighs.

“Children,” Thor starts quietly, “are regarded as the greatest gift on Asgard, no matter their origin. As you recall, my brother Loki is, as you say on Midgard, ‘adopted’, and my father and mother still think him their son. Despite his…recent behavior.”

“But wouldn’t these kids be better off with…someone else? Someone better prepared for this kind of thing?” She offers, trying to keep her language mild enough that she can still back out. These kids surely need something, some _one_ more than her.

“Who better?”

“Just…someone else.” She shakes her head at herself and clings a little closer. She doesn’t know. Everything is just happening so fast.

“Dearest Jane, do you not wish to raise these children as if they were our own?”

“What? I—No! No, it’s not that,” she sits up quickly, looking Thor in the eyes. He seems particularly calm, and she wishes she could claim the same of herself. “I just…what if I’m not…” Thor doesn’t offer her an out by interrupting, which is somewhat uncharacteristic of him, so she huffs and just spits it out. “What if I’m not a good mother?”

Thor’s eyes soften, and he grins that sweet, sexy smile and pulls her into a quick, chaste kiss, chuckling as he does. She wants to be indignant that he’s laughing at her, but she’s kind of distracted about this whole crazy situation, so she doesn’t really remember to. “You will make a wonderful mother,” he declares with the utmost conviction.

“But—”

“In fact, I had planned to ask if you would not consider bearing my young, before the appearance of these children.”

She blinks repeatedly at Thor. “Really?” She can’t help the happy flutter in her chest, the one that only Thor ever seems to give her.

“You are strong, Jane,” he says, his lighter tone taking a slight turn for the serious. It takes her breath away sometimes, his complete faith in her. Here she is, still shocked and amazed by the fact that she’s dating a Norse God, and Thor just fell in love with her and never looked back. Never doubted himself once. He has two entire planets worth of humans and gods, and he chose her and never once thought twice. “As are Magni and Modi. If they will have us as their parents, I wish to make our familial bond official. In accordance with the Asgardian ways, as well as with the Midgardian ceremony of bonding. Then perhaps, one day, we may discuss expanding our brood with another young warrior. I had always wished my parents chose to have a third,” he says wistfully, while Jane is still balking.

It takes her a minute to find words, but she does, because “Holy shit, did you just _propose_ to me?”

He frowns a moment, no doubt puzzling out the Midgardian term, and then he smiles brightly when he gets it and says “Indeed, I have.”

She has to take a couple really deep breaths right then. She’s feeling a little dizzy. In fact, she’s been feeling ‘a little dizzy’ since Thor fell from the sky in a rain of lightning and hit her car. She’s been going so fast that she’s barely had time to breathe, let alone think, and she’s loved every single second of it.

“Do you accept?”

So honestly, what kind of a question is that?

“Yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I figured I needed one Thor/Jane chapter. I don't really ship Thor with anyone, so I end up defaulting to canon, sorry. Though I enjoyed writing Jane, even though I hate her in the movie. So there's that.


	23. Chapter 23

Bruce sighs and puts down the white board marker he’s been using to write equations for one of his small-scale research projects. Tony takes issue with Bruce using an old-fashioned marker to write on panes of glass designed to act exactly as tablets, but he likes being able to hold something while he works. Besides, he has a tendency to break a lot of technology he comes in contact with. He’d rather it be a cheap white board marker than a $3,000 computer.

Since he shifted his focus to researching things that help people, rather than things that have the potential to destroy people, he’s been a lot happier. Most of the work he does is going to end up published under an alias, but he doesn’t care so long as the government gets it to the people that need it. He’s working on a few vaccines that could revolutionize most of third world medicine, so he’s doing good work.

There’s a scuffle behind him, suddenly, and Bruce frowns as he turns to see what it is. He doesn’t see anything, but then he shifts his gaze downward and lands on Amy and Zeke, grabbing at each other and rolling around, making an awful lot of noise, now that he notices it.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he says quickly, crouching down before pulling them apart from one another. Amy kicks out toward Zeke one last time, but misses, and Zeke blows a raspberry at her and then promptly runs out of the lab on unsteady legs. “Don’t fall asleep in the shooting range again!” Bruce calls after him, figuring it’s probably a moot point. At least Clint’s aim is good enough to miss the kid every time.

Amy grins at the departure of her brother and makes “up” arms. Bruce acquiesces, picking her up just to set her down on the edge of one of his desks, taking a seat next to her and going to tap the computer on. He’s going to have to ask Tony to change his security codes again, though by now he doesn’t see the point. The twins are probably just getting help from Tony’s new miniature lab assistant.

“You know you’re not supposed to be in here,” Bruce says gently, watching her in periphery. She’s swinging her legs happily on the edge of the desk and using a pencil to scribble all over one of his notebooks.

“Yup,” she says cheerfully, and keeps scribbling.

Bruce sighs and gets up, stumbling around the lab for a minute before finding one of the coloring books one of the twins left the last time they were down here, grabbing a set of markers that probably aren’t washable and setting both in front of her. She hums happily and abandons his notebook and pencil for the brighter, funner version, sprawling out over the top of the desk to lay on her front. Her tongue pokes out comically between her lips while she draws a purple streak right through the head of one of the cartoon outlines.

He takes his seat again and studies her, trying to figure out how he got to this point. His life changed so dramatically after the appearance of the Other Guy that he’d basically had to rewrite his future possibilities. Betty and him had tried, but that ultimately ended when she realized her biological clock was ticking and Bruce could never give her what she wanted, in the end. Even after Tony helped him with what he deplorably named the ‘Super Sexy-Times Serum’ in some sort of childish insult to the Captain.

But still, even with his options opened back up to romance, children were out of the question. Always had been. Because all it would take is one ill-timed flash of anger, and then there’d be nothing but tiny coffins and failed suicide attempts in his future. He’d probably turn his life’s work into figuring out a way to kill himself, finally, for the good of humanity.

A shudder runs through him at the thought, and he tries to go back to checking his email. The whole situation is still a possibility, now that there are children and he has no say about it. But strangely, he’s been confusingly calm about the entire ordeal. He can’t figure out if it’s because of necessity or because he knows that somehow, these kids are different.

Maybe he was wrong.

He gives up on his email and leans back in his chair, turning his eyes once again on Amy. She has sandy-brown hair that falls in waves to her shoulders and striking green eyes that seem impossibly sharp for her age. Her skin is like cream, completely untouched, which is why it worries him to death whenever she gets rough with her brother, or does one of the million impossibly dangerous things that she seems to think are a good idea. She’s the risk-taker of the two of them, and she’s got quite a temper.

None of these things speak to her genetic heritage, as far as he’s concerned. Even if Zeke looks a bit more like Bruce, with the dark hair and chocolate-brown eyes, the two are more likely to be Steve’s kids than his. Or Thor’s. Or Barton’s. He’s having trouble picturing any universe where he willingly becomes a father, unless the Other Guy weren’t a part of the equation. Judging by the twins’ lack of shock that he sometimes turns green and doubles in size, he existed in their universe.

And yet, they’re somehow convinced that he’s their father. Assuming his Portuguese is adequate, anyway. That’s the real kicker.

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” He asks, before he can really think about it. He doesn’t think trying to assuage his fear by asking a toddler about it is going to help, much, but you never know. He’s already said it, anyway.

“Nope,” she says pointedly, and keeps coloring like that’s the end of the discussion.

“What about the Other Guy?” He asks, trying to keep his voice even. He doesn’t want to accidentally suggest that she _should_ be afraid of him, even if he thinks that’s the only logical reaction. Judging by her frown, the alternate version of him didn’t refer to the Hulk as that. “The big, green guy?”

Suddenly, she smiles, and it lights up her whole face. “Raiva.”

Well, apparently she’s bilingual, then. ‘Raiva’ means ‘anger’ in Portuguese. That’s a fitting name for the Other Guy, if he does say so himself. He’d almost like to meet his alternate self, if that weren’t distinctly impossible.

“Raiva, then,” he says carefully. He wants them to maintain as much of their former lives as possible, and if they called the Other Guy ‘Raiva’ then he’s got no right to try to change that. “Does he scare you?”

She frowns and looks up at Bruce like he’s stupid. “Noooo,” she says slowly, watching him carefully. “He’s Raiva.” She says this last bit definitively, like it’s the be-all, end-all of statements, and maybe for her, in her world, it is. Unfortunately, the rest of the world couldn’t operate with a three-year-old’s logic, and he pushed the issue.

“But you know he’s very…” he paused, contemplating his words. “Strong,” he finished, almost wincing at how very little that actually conveyed of the Other Guy. “He could hurt you,” he tries, watching her still as she colors away. He’s trying to be so careful, trying not to ruin her view of the world, her absolute trust that the world is a good place and that nothing bad will ever happen. Even if he knows that isn’t entirely true, and she essentially grew up in a war zone, she still seems to think he’s infallible. That the world would never wrong her.

“Nope,” she says again, hardly acknowledging him. “Won’t.”

He frowns, trying to connect the dots. Had his other self really been so naive as to think the Other Guy wasn’t a danger to them? So what if apparently, the first time Amy had seen him—the Hulk, that is—she’d run up and hugged his leg? Even if he—the Other Guy—hadn’t hurt her that time, there’s always the potential. It’s the entire reason he gave up on ever having children. He’s terrified of what could happen to them.

He’s been walking around for weeks now, stunned into happiness that these two amazing little people weren’t afraid of him, tricking himself into thinking he could have this. But he’s been careful, so careful, to keep his calm. To make sure neither of them get hurt, whether because of him or just because. He’s practically been hovering with his arms forming a loop around them, following them with a protective bubble whenever he could, trying to make sure they’re safe here. That nothing will ever harm them again.

They’d been so worn, when they got here. Hurt. Bruises everywhere, cuts and scrapes that barely had time to heal before being ripped back open. They’ve patched up nicely since, and the dirt’s been scrubbed clean, but Bruce still sees it sometimes, and it stops his heart. The tattered clothing and seared-off ends of hair, the markings of war. It’d been horrible. And he’s made it his life’s goal to keep them from ever living like that again. He doesn’t know when or how it happened, but somewhere between waking up in a pile of rubble with a little girl clinging to his leg and now, he’s fallen for these kids about as hard as they seemed to fall for him. He loves them like his own, despite the angry warning in his head that keeps on screaming _‘Danger! Danger! Danger!’_

He kept meaning to stop it before it got too far. He saw what they were doing to him, having Amy follow him around and cling to him like a limpet, watching Zeke use his test tubes as finger puppets. He thought _‘There’s still time, I can still pretend. Just a little longer’_ and then he’d promptly gone and missed his deadline. He can’t abandon them now. Can’t cut himself off. He never could. They love him. And he’s not their father, never intended to _be_ their father, but they don’t know any different, and the line is starting to blur for him, too.

It’s dangerous. He’s terrified of hurting them, even by accident, and he knows this is a horrible idea but he can’t stop it. He keeps hoping someone will force it upon them, some circumstances out of their control that keep them away from one another. Because as much as it’ll hurt, they’ll be safe, then. They’ll be safe without him in their lives. It’s all he can think about.

“Amy,” he says cautiously, and waits until she stops coloring and looks up at him. Her eyes are curious and open and a beautiful, sage green—a calm, safe green—and he forces himself to continue, because he needs to protect that. Protect her. “I’m dangerous,” he says simply. “I could hurt you by accident.” _I could kill you by accident,_ he doesn’t say. “You can’t keep spending time with me.”

For a moment, her eyes tear up and her lower lip wobbles, and Bruce is so stricken with sheer panic that he can’t move. He just freezes, heart beating rapidly in his chest, terrified and so fucking _angry_ with himself, with the world, because these kids have been through damn enough already, they don’t need anything in this world making them cry. They should have everything, _everything_ they could ever want or need, handed to them on a fucking silver platter, because no one deserves to go through what they did. Flashes of her face, of Zeke’s, of all of them, standing there, staring at them. Scared. War-torn, beaten, bruised, bleeding. In tattered clothes with smoke and dust and grunge and misery clinging to their skin. Eyes haunted by the ghosts of their parents. Too busy fighting for their lives to grieve.

They didn’t deserve it. Their lives were ripped away from them for nothing. For no reason. They lost damn near everything they cared about, and in a couple of years, Amy won’t even remember it, she’s so young. They lost everything before they even had a notion of what ‘everything’ was. He can’t stand it. Can’t stand thinking about it, can’t stand that it happened. It’s just heartbreaking, and sad, and it fills him with indignant rage on their behalf, because half of these kids are too young to know what was taken away from them, and the other half are still too shaken up, too used to fighting for survival, to take a moment and hate the world.

“Pai!” Amy shouts, bringing it back from wherever he went. Amy’s left her spot on the desk next to him and is sitting on the one right in front of him, leaning forward, her hands on each of his cheeks. She’s looking at him with such determination that the shock of it causes him to stop breathing for a moment.

“Uh,” he says helplessly, staring at her and her little, furrowed brow.

She pauses, as if waiting for his absolute, rapt attention, and then, only when she seems satisfied, she declares “No.” She stares at him, saying something with her eyes, he’s sure, and then she abruptly pulls back. In seconds, she’s hopping down off the desk, grabbing a page ripped from her coloring book, and bolting out of the lab.

Bruce sits, staring at the place where she finally disappeared around a corner, trying to make sense of what the heck just happened. Even by a three-year-old’s logic, it seems pretty confusing, but maybe Amy isn’t your average three-year-old. Maybe he isn’t even supposed to understand what that was about.

He sighs, giving up on trying to parse some sort of meaning from what just happened, and goes to clean the markers and the rest of the coloring book. There’s a collection of marker lines in various colors all over the top of his desk that he leaves there with a small smile.

It isn’t until much, much later that he realizes exactly what he’d been feeling in those moments before Amy snapped him out of it. He’d been pissed. Furious. More so than he’s ever been before. And he hadn’t hulked out. Hadn’t even thought about it.

Because Amy was there.


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I've been really bad about updating lately and sorry this is so short. I have about a 10-chapter buffer but I don't wanna burn through that too quickly so this is it for now. It's midterm season so I'm really swamped with school and I haven't been writing. :( I promise I'll be better. Also, spring break in a week. :D

“I’m moving into the tower,” she says staunchly, keeping her pace steady and completely refusing to acknowledge Tony trailing along behind her like a lost mutt.

“But—But Pepper,” Tony starts, all wide-eyed innocence, as if either of them really believe he could possibly have a shred of innocence left in his body. “Why?”

She stops walking abruptly, her heels clicking into place beneath her, and she turns to Tony. “Because,” she says primly, hoping she looks as intimidating as she’s trying to be, “I’m not going to take Claire away from her siblings, and I want to be a part of her life.” There. Simple, elegant, truthful—surely Tony should understand.

He blinks at her stupidly. She resists the urge to sigh, pat his head, and tell him that he’ll understand when he’s older. They’d be waiting far too long for that day to come, anyway.

“But Pepper,” he whines suddenly, “the last time you lived in the same building as me—”

“Oh, trust me,” she says with a wry grin and a raised eyebrow. “I haven’t forgotten.”

“I never got any work done! It was always just _‘eat, sleep, go to board meetings’_.” She presses her lips together in an effort not to laugh at him. At least this time she certainly won’t be making the mistake of having him attend board meetings. She’s far too fond of being CEO to let that happen. Besides, he has other people watching his back now. She’s too busy to continue babysitting him, but maybe just her presence alone will make him take better care of himself. She can hope, right? “I’m going to get _fat,_ Pep.”

She barks out a laugh. “Tony, you’d need to consume something other than coffee and power bars for that to happen. Besides, I’ve got Claire now, I don’t have time to take care of two children.” She shoots him a playful smirk and begins walking again, albeit slowly enough for him to catch up once he stops his indignant squawking. He always does love to make a spectacle of himself. She checks her watch. She has fifteen minutes to make it to her meeting. Hopefully Tony Stark will be long gone by then. She fears for the drop in stock prices if he’s so much as spotted anywhere near the board members. They’ve quite taken to having him be the ‘ghost inventor’, as it were.

When he does match her stride, he’s so quiet that Pepper almost thinks he’s left, but she can still hear his footsteps behind her. She stops just before she turns the corner and faces him, knitting her eyebrows together, confused. He seems almost…worried.

When he speaks, his voice is grittier, and much more serious than she even thought possible from him anymore. “You know we’re not their parents.”

Something fierce and ugly roars to life in her, but she forces it back down, because there’s no use envying the dead. “I know,” she replies softly, because spending more and more time with Claire, it’s become increasingly obvious how very much she is not Claire’s mother. She doesn’t expect anything, though. She’s never going to ask Claire to call her ‘mom’, and she’s never going to expect anything from her, if she can help it. She just wants to be there. She wants Claire to have someone. She’s a beautiful, bright young woman, and Pepper wants to keep her safe, and happy. It’s almost instinctual. “I need to do this.”

Tony nods, and she nods back, a moment of unspoken truth passing between them, and then she watches as he casually transforms himself back into the completely immature, middle-aged, whiny teenager that he is.

“Pep, Pepper, Pepperoni, does the board miss me yet?” He asks, his grin taking over his face. Pepper rolls her eyes and starts walking back toward the meeting room. “Tell Old Mr. Johnston that I miss him dearly. Honestly, who said handlebar mustaches were ever going out of style? That man is capital C-L-ass-Y.” Pepper bites her tongue to keep from laughing, walking on like she simply isn’t hearing Tony insult each and every board member in turn. This is exactly why he’s been banned from the premises. She’s fairly certain one of the board members has a restraining order against him, at this point.

Still, she smirks knowingly to herself, setting Tony off on another tirade in his quest to figure out what it is she’s smirking about. Because she knows now, like she knew that Tony Stark always had a heart, that somewhere, deep down behind all that false bravado, lies a man willing to do anything to be a good father for one lost, scared little girl.


	25. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, sorry, sorry! I've been so bad at updating oh my gosh. This one's kind of longer so here, have it.
> 
> If I can find some time on Easter Sunday, I'll post another chapter then. I realized I have a bit more room to work than I thought? So that's good I guess.

Sammy isn’t trying to keep track. Really, he isn’t. It’s just…he can’t help it. They’re playing Parental Look-Alike here and Sammy can’t help but wonder who got voted off the island in this universe and who’s still around. He hasn’t seen hide nor hair of his dad’s counterpart, and neither has Nari. So while everyone else is playing house, he and Nari usually slip off into some dark room to play video games until they get hungry enough to go digging around in Tony’s massive kitchen.

He would be bitter that he seems to have lost all but one of his siblings to their pseudo-parents, but he can’t really blame them. He likes to pretend that he wouldn’t turn into a quibbling mess if his not-dad showed up, but he knows the truth.

With Captain Deadbeat being the way he is, and Kennedy and Tony playing Mystery Science Theater all the time, Peter still seems to be withdrawing from the rest of them now that the Apocalypse isn’t resting on his shoulders. He has his own lab, and now that the seconds generations—G2s, as Sammy likes to call them—have mostly stopped sleeping in one armored and guarded room, Peter even has his own quarters a floor or two below.

Sometimes Sammy considers asking for his own apartment-style setup because he’s sick of seeing everyone but him happy and pampered, but then he remembers that he’s still got Nari, even if Thor and Jane have basically decided to adopt him whenever Sammy’s not around. None of them talk about the two parents that aren’t here. Sammy doesn’t even know if this universe ever even had a Coulson, and with Peter’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, he’s never going to.

So he sticks close to Nari, and they catch Pokemon instead of thinking about the parents they still don’t have, and at night Nari goes to curl up next to Mac and Mo and their new little family, and Sammy finds a different empty room each night and curls up in a chair or under a desk. He even got Kennedy to break into the old store rooms on the lower floors and put some of the old Stark Industries weapons to good use, even if it is only to help a couple of terrified teenagers sleep at night. (Peter still carries a knife on him at all times. Claire still has her taser from Aunt Darcy. Sammy thinks he’s entitled to a gun or two or four.)

And then Loki shows up.

Which no one found important to mention to him before all this happened. _Assholes._

So it went down like this: Nari and Sammy are in the kitchen attempting to pop five bags of popcorn because all of the Avengers and the G2s are having a movie night, sans Steve (because he has something against them) and Pepper, who’s in India right now working on some business deal. And, of course, the ever-absent fathers.

 _Lilo & Stitch_ is all queued up, popcorn is spinning and popping in the microwave, and laughter is permeating the air. All until there’s a faint _pop_ that didn’t come from the microwave, and then the other room goes deadly silent, and then a drawling voice starts in on “How quaint, I see you’ve stolen a Midgardian nursery to justify your disgusting desire to watch poor-quality television.”

However, the seeming humans-are-swine rant from Loki gets interrupted when Nari tears from the kitchen, yelling “Daddy!” and throwing himself at Loki’s form. They both tumble to the ground in a mess of limbs and Loki’s very strange, horned hat, and Sammy would be laughing if he weren’t worried something was about to go terribly, terribly wrong. He didn’t like this way this Loki sounded. This Loki isn’t the Loki they know, and he isn’t Nari’s father, and sometimes Sammy worries he’s the only one that remembers that their parents are dead and they _don’t know these people._

“Filthy child!” Loki spits, standing and brushing himself off pretentiously, sneering down at Nari’s form on the ground. Sammy doesn’t even think, just rushes forward and throws himself around Nari, pulling him back a good few feet and glaring up at the man. The last on his list, besides Dad, finally here in the flesh to further prove that Sammy has the worst luck in two galaxies.

“D-dad,” Nari quivers, and Sammy just pulls him further back. Something is wrong. Something more than Sammy’s own father being the only one missing, because the way these Avengers are acting around Loki is anything but relaxed. Clint is glaring and Natasha looks downright homicidal, and even Tony seems to be keeping a firm grip on Kennedy.

“I am not your father,” Loki snaps back, turning to Thor. “What is the meaning of this?”

“You misunderstand, brother,” Thor says with regal calmness. “These children are gifts. If they should choose us their parents then—”

“You expect us to _raise_ these Midgardian swine? As we would our own kin? Do you intend to repeat the same mistakes father made with me?”

“They are not Midgardian, they are of Asgard,” Thor retorts immediately, standing up to face Loki at eye level. Sammy pulls a silent, watchful Nari back another yard. Jane grabs Mac around the middle and presses him firmly back into the couch. “They are our blood, brother.”

“Impossible.”

“Valaskjálf has shown me the truth,” Thor states firmly, and Sammy frowns in confusion. He thinks that’s the hall where you can see the nine realms all spread out before you, but Sammy’s a bit surprised that Thor would consider going to such a place for clarification regarding the G2s. Thor seems so flawlessly trusting at times. “These are our children, brother, our kin.”

“Kin means little to me,” Loki sneers, and his fingers tighten around the staff in his hand.

“They are our blood.”

“Your blood.”

“Yours, brother. Valaskjálf does not lie, you know this,” Thor reasons, his hands reaching out toward Loki in a peace offering, of sorts. “I have seen these children. They are not of these nine realms but another, much similar. Young Nari was born of your seed. He is your son.”

“I have no son!” Loki shouts, stepping back in what would be a stagger, if Loki were anything less than god-like.

“Daddy,” Nari whispers quietly, tears in his eyes, and Sammy freezes in terror. The last thing he needs is this Loki to snap and go postal on the kid. Right now, it would do them all well to let Loki forget Nari is even present.

But instead, Loki’s eyes dart first to Sammy, then to Nari, where they rest for a long time in absolute silence. Sammy holds his breath. “Dad,” Nari repeats, reaching out a hand before him as he steps out of Sammy’s grip, toward the person he thinks is his father.

Sammy’s heart skips a beat in his chest when Nari’s fingers close around the edge of Loki’s cape, tugging ever-so-gently as he whispers “Dad, please.” _Please love me. Please don’t leave me again,_ Sammy hears, and he has to close his eyes against the force of it. Nari should know better by now. Sammy’s told him a hundred thousand times, his father is gone. Gone just like the rest of them, never coming back. These people are different, and while Sammy’s very sure they’re (mostly) nice people, they can’t be expected to fill roles they never signed up for.

But faced with the reality for the first time…

Loki stares, expressionless, down at Nari’s doe-eyes and shaking lower lip, slim fingers curled around fabric. Sammy holds out hope, just for a moment, but then—

“Release me, filth.” Loki takes two wide steps back, his cape falling from Nari’s grasp, and in a flash his eyes have raised back to the contemplative form of his brother. There’s an icy hardness in them that Sammy knows by now to fear. “I will not be made a fool of, brother,” he says smoothly. “Return these vermin to the squalor from whence they came, then seek me out. As for now, I have things to attend to.” The corner of his lips twist up in a wicked smirk that vanishes just as quickly as it appears. “This city has been much too quiet of late.”

With that, Loki disappears in the blink of an eye, and a crashing sound echoes from blocks away, followed by a slowly building chorus of screams.

“Shit,” Clint swears, swinging up out of the seat and running to fetch his bow and quiver. The rest of the Avengers launch into action immediately, grabbing their gear before they take off into the night. Nari collapses into an inconsolable puddle on the floor, and nothing Claire or him say or do can calm him down. Tony is the last out, everything but the faceplate of the suit ready to take off, and he hesitates just before he goes, looking at Sammy.

Sammy tears his eyes away from the miserable Nari, glancing over the panicked faces of the rest of the G2s, and meets Tony’s eyes with a hard, intense expression. Before he can say a single word, Peter cuts over him, showing the first sign of true anger since they got here. “Go,” he barks. “Just go. We’ll pick up your mess.”

Tony’s face falls just before he snaps the faceplate down and jets out of the room, off to save the city of New York from Nari’s apparently rogue father. Peter, Claire, and Sammy all corral the younger kids, sharing desperate, wild looks over the tops of heads while they all silently wonder if maybe, they just got their parents back only to lose them all over again.

Maybe this time, like the last time, the Avengers just...won’t come home.


	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is stupidly short but it's significant so I think I'm gonna say it's all for now. And it gets rid of the accidental cliffhanger soo....
> 
> I still have a ten chapter buffer though so once I write chapter 37, I'll try to remember to post 27.

When they finish cleaning up Loki’s mess and stumble back to the tower, Tony realizes that Loki rampaging through New York was the least of their worries. The kids are a mess. He has a hard time figuring out why until a few pointed, sharp words from Peter reminds Tony that, yeah, they might still have some issues with seeing their pseudo-parents suit up and take off without any reassurance that they’ll be coming back.

Peter refuses to speak to him, and he glares every time he sees Tony with Kennedy. Kennedy clings a little closer, and she’s quieter than usual—the whole mute thing aside. (He’s going to ask questions about that one day, but for now, he placates himself by trying to learn her sign language and having JARVIS translate everything.)

Comparatively, she’s handling it a lot better than some of the other kids. Nari had closed himself down by the time they got back and wouldn't acknowledge anyone outside of Sammy, who keeps staring daggers into any of the Avengers when they're around like being superheroes makes them the scum of the Earth. Bruce had a pow-wow with Peter, because Bruce is the only one of the Avengers that Peter seems okay with speaking to right now. Tony’s assuming he explained the Loki situation.

They’re all flying by the seat of their pants here, trying not to overstep their bounds while simultaneously taking care of a dozen psychologically traumatized kids. He thinks Peter should maybe give them a little more leniency. It’s a pretty steep learning curve.

Steve is right about one thing. A part of Tony doesn’t want to forgive Fury for sticking them with the kids when they obviously have bigger fish to fry. The fate of the world rests on their shoulders every other damn week, and the kids are a distraction from that.

But there’s another part of Tony that will sometimes catch glimpses of his mother in Kennedy, and his heart swells to bursting in a way he never expected to experience. It’s illogical, but in the short time the kids have been here, they’ve managed to become such an integral part of his life that he can’t imagine life without them. Kennedy is blindingly smart, probably more than Tony was at that age, and she manages to show everyone just how much of a firecracker she is without speaking a word.

Claire, somehow managing to balance teenage awkwardness and Pepper’s grace. And Peter, pulling all of them together, making sure things don’t fall to pieces, giving them a foundation. Giving them what they lost with Coulson’s death.

It’s the one thing none of them have been talking about. How rough around the edges they’ve been, how much things have changed since that initial unity, in the wake of such a great tragedy. They’ve been cracking apart since then; splintering. Tony doesn’t know how much longer they would’ve lasted, left to their own devices. All he knows is, the kids saved them when they didn’t even know they needed saving. Once Steve pulls his head out of the sand, they’ll be more of team than they ever were, even during that first battle. For that, he’ll hold his tongue and count his blessings.


	27. Chapter 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M SO SORRY. I didn't realize it had been three weeks I swear and now I'm kicking myself over this. I'll try to get some writing done tonight (after Supernatural) seeing as I don't have too much pressing homework right now. Once I finish the whole thing I swear I'll try to post a chapter a week at least, probably more. Sorry!

There isn’t much in Natasha’s life that drives her. It’s very simple, really. Do the job. Stay alive. That’s all. That’s all there’s ever been for her. And then there was Barton. Barton, who disobeyed orders on a ‘feeling’. Barton, who has kept her alive despite risk to himself so many times that she’s lost track, and she remembers nearly everything. Barton, who gave her SHIELD and the Avengers and a home and a family.

Clint, who gave her love.

Needless to say, her usual drive was shot to hell after that. Instead of ‘do the job’ it was ‘save the world’. Instead of ‘stay alive’ it was ‘keep my team alive’. Things were messy enough as it was, without these children. She didn’t think she had the patience to keep doing as she’d been doing before. But now? Now, surely she would break. And Natasha has never had much use for broken things.

So she waits. She waits for the moment she ceases to be useful. She waits until her life, previously so carefully constructed and stable, careens toward its bloody end. It is only a matter of time. All she has to do is wait, and it will come. Her time will come.

She thinks it may happen when Clint and her end. It certainly feels like the world is collapsing on her chest, but that only lasts a minute before she chides herself for being so stereotypically romantic. Love is for children, after all.

Instead, when it happens, it doesn’t—not truly. 

She has been a ghost. Maybe it’s her natural instinct as an assassin to remain quiet at all times, move through the shadows without so much as a whisper and come up to people from behind. But since she’d joined the Avengers, she’d been more relaxed about it. She would announce herself before walking into rooms. She would sometimes take the less-defensible position in a room if someone were already occupying first choice.

With the arrival of the children—the G2s, as they’ve been called—she’s reverted. Relapsed, almost. She likes to think that while everyone is busy playing house, she’s keeping true to form and holding steady. She reasoned that they were all getting soft. Love is a weakness. Steve seemed to be the only one that understood, and he didn’t particularly handle spending so much time away from Tony well. She was alone in this.

She expected to hate them on instinct. They were foreign, they couldn’t be trusted, and they were burdens. They were another obstacle in a mission. If it had been an option, she would’ve taken them out as soon as strategically possible. As it were, Tony stopped her in her first attempt, by some miracle of miracles, and she’s been expressly forbid since to do any harm to the G2s. So she ignored them.

She didn’t anticipate…this.

Claire is in the rec room. Natasha takes pause at this not only because it’s the first time she’s seen any of the G2s in this part of the tower, but also because she’s attempting to spar with the air. It has a somewhat comical quality, like a kata performed by an amateur, but she has a certain sense of grace that warns Natasha she knows more than she’s let on. Of all these supposed ‘children’, Claire seemed the least likely to get involved in a fight. She was level-headed and cautious, and would do well with a managerial position than anything.

It’s rare, but Natasha has been wrong before.

Claire is facing out toward the city skyline, through five-inch reinforced glass, and it’s bright enough that Natasha doubts she can be seen, hovering in the shadowy doorway as she is. She should probably leave. She’d meant to take a few rounds with the punching bag, maybe head over to the firing range to let off some steam, but obviously now is not the most opportune time.

As she turns to leave, an itching feeling starts at the base of her skull, creeping upward, and she tries to clench her teeth until it dissipates. It doesn’t work. She braces herself, turning back to face the open rec room, and takes a controlled, deep breath.

“You’re going to tire in a matter of minutes with that technique.”

Claire is so startled by her voice that she spins around too quickly, losing balancing and windmilling dramatically until she lands in a heap on the mats. Natasha starts laughing—which, it seems, only serves to shock Claire more.

She tries to relax her posture as she approaches Claire, and by the time she lends her hand to help the tiny-framed wisp up, she’s at ease in a way she hasn’t felt since she started trusting Clint.

“N-Natasha,” Claire stutters out, blushing a furious shade of red. Natasha arches one eyebrow at her in amusement. For someone born of Pepper’s finely-tuned composure, she still carries all the vices of a 12-year-old girl. Natasha wonders what it must be like, living with your emotions so openly on display for the world; trying to survive schooling with that.

No, throwing knives was much, much easier.

“You need to control your motions,” she presses onward. “Keep everything tight to your body until you plan to strike.” She takes a step back and demonstrates, adjusting her body to one of the more basic fighting stances. “When you move, know exactly where your hits will land and with how much force. Know it so well that you couldn’t throw another sloppy punch if you tried.” She punches out a couple of times in quick succession. Claire’s eyes are focused intently on her every move. “When you master the basic technique, that’s when you can start improvising, combining different styles and moves to suit your target.”

Without a word’s warning, she ducks down and sweeps her leg toward Claire, connecting with minimal force at the back of her knees. Claire hits the ground hard, though a lot softer if Natasha hadn’t been holding back. She wonders for a moment if she’s gone too far, when Claire doesn’t move to counterattack or get up right away. Not everyone responds positively to negative reinforcement. Most fighters weren’t trained by the Soviets from the time they could walk. Every instinct in her body tells her that Claire is fragile, and so long as she poses no obvious threat, she should be handled with care.

But if that were true, Natasha wouldn’t be able to help her.

Claire rises in spectacular fashion, suggesting some type of gymnastic capability, and she doesn’t hesitate before striking out for Natasha, a wild left hook that misses, but only just. Natasha retreats back a few paces and studies Claire’s form again. Her stance is wide-set, with her arms pulled in tighter than before. Her breath comes in rapid puffs and blows the bright red hair streaking over her face. But she looks determined, willing to take whatever Natasha throws at her and then some, and perhaps she’s been underestimating these kids. They spent the last year waging a war. They’re rough around the edges and sharp-witted. Not at all fragile.

Natasha smiles. “Nice move, Scrappy,” she taunts playfully, tightening her stance and preparing her next move. “Now let’s see you actually land one.”


	28. Chapter 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know. I'll be in my corner.

Bruce was wrong. There is one thing more terrifying than being saddled with psychologically traumatized twins in the peak of their terrible threes, and thy name is Tony Stark. Who is, for all intents and purposes, an overgrown toddler with overgrown toys, currently throwing a temper tantrum.

“JARVIS, would you please tell _Peter_ that the law states—”

“JARVIS, _kindly_ remind Mr. Stark that he is by far the last person to be preaching about following the law, when he breaks about ten every day.”

“JARVIS, for the record, it is no more than eight. On a good day.”

“ _Sirs_ , I am the most advanced artificial intelligence designed to date with processors capable of running at speeds greatly exceeding that of the White House and SHIELD supercomputers, and I cannot possibly relay messages between you at the current rate. Also, may I add that, as both sirs are located in the same room, my services seem quite arbitrary and—”

“Shut up, JARVIS!” Both Peter and Tony shout at once, and JARVIS huffs a small sigh and makes no further sound, probably summoning Dummy from the workshop to throw toast at Peter and Tony while they glare at one another.

Clint sidles up to Bruce and asks nonchalantly “What’s ruffled their feathers?”

Bruce ignores the pun in favor of watching Peter cross his arms over his chest only for Tony to echo the same stance, both of them dropping it the moment they realize. For all their differences in personality and outward character, Peter seems to have adopted a hefty amount of Tony’s physical mannerisms. It makes for an interesting spectator sport.

“Something about school?” Bruce answers weakly.

“School?”

Bruce shrugs. “Fury thinks it’s a good idea.”

“Yeah, well what Fury thinks is a good idea and what the rest of the world thinks is a good idea tend to be very different things.”

“You needn't remind me,” he replies slowly, leaning back against the wall and curling a hand around the back of Zeke’s head as he clings to Bruce’s leg and peeks out at the source of all this noise. “Fury thought it was a good idea to have the Other Guy join this team.”

Clint steals a sideways look at Bruce and relaxes back against the same wall as the argument between Peter and Tony progresses past silent staring to actual shouting again, this time without the pretense of a translator. “I’m fairly sure the only one that thinks that was a bad idea is you, Doc. And possibly Loki.”

Bruce cracks a smile. “You may want to speak with Natasha about that. She was the one being chased by a few tons of angry, green monster thousands of miles in the air.”

“Hasn’t she forgiven you for that yet?” Clint prods humorously, shaking his head and clucking his tongue once. “That woman. Made of stone.”

“Lucky her. She might actually survive this place collapsing in the wake of Tony and Peter over here.” He pauses to try to catch tidbits of conversation between Tony and Peter, but by now they’ve moved on to something between ranting and shouting, and they’re both vying for title of the loudest by speaking at the same time. “Should we intervene?”

Clint waits before answering, and Zeke buries his face behind Bruce’s pant leg. He keeps his palm curled protectively around the back of Zeke’s head and glances over to where Amy is ensconced in Sammy’s arms, sucking on her thumb. Sammy looks _furious._

“Nah,” Clint replies finally. “Let ‘em get it out of their systems.” He rolls his shoulder and slumps further into the wall, a small smile pulling at the corner of his mouth while he watches the show. When Peter is really engrossed in his conversation, he has a tendency to sign half the words he says, probably without noticing. It’s one of the small things Bruce noticed that makes him wonder the extent of Kennedy’s limitations, but he hasn’t had a chance to ask Peter about it yet.

“May I remind you that the last time Tony Stark ‘got it out of his system’, he ended up throwing a birthday party that resulted in half his mansion getting blown to smithereens and the military getting their hands on one of his suits.”

Clint just shrugs. “Could’a been worse.”

Bruce fails to see how, but he holds his tongue and tunes back into the fight instead.

“—putting a bunch of psychologically traumatized kids in a classroom with other kindergarteners is a _grand_ idea, do you know the—”

“—all for self-education, it’s not as if I got anything out of the public school system but apparently it’s good for normal—”

“—case you failed to notice, we’re not ‘normal’ to any extent of the word,” Peter bites back, though both of them have lowered their voice to a reasonably loud conversation, rather than a shouting match.

“Of course not. Normal is out of the question. Gone. Not even in the dictionary. But kid—”

“Don’t call me ‘kid’.”

“You are a—”

“Kids don’t have to shoot a toddler because it’s better than listening to her scream while the tinea play fetch with part of her arm.”

A cold, heavy silence falls over the room. Bruce hears Clint draw in a sharp breath, and Tony’s jawline tightens.

“The twins aren’t twins, you know.” Peter says slowly, a twisted, pained smile flickering across his face. “Before the siege…” Bruce presses his hand a little firmer against the back of Zeke’s head and feels a chill spark up his spine.

“They were triplets.”


	29. Chapter 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just found like three grammar mistakes in this and I don't know where the heck they came from, so I apologize for the horrible grammar in this chapter, I must've written it at 3am. I promise this is all going to be beta'd one day. I fixed what I saw.

Clint starts shooting things. It’s all he knows how to do. He grabs every bow in his arsenal, and goes through several clips with every gun in the shooting range, and he’s moved on to throwing knives now that the arrows and bullets all litter the little paper men on the other end of the shooting range. By the time he’s gone through half the knives at his disposal, his aim is shot to shit and his hands are shaking so much that he’s almost cut off a finger more than once. With one final burst of anger, he flings the knife in his palm at the stupid fucking target, and listens to its deafening thud.

Jesus fucking Christ, that kid really knows how to make them feel like shit. Never mind that they’re doing the best they can. None of them signed up for this. None of them ever intended to be parents.

Triplets… Fuck, you can’t just throw that at a guy and expect him to be okay. Does Peter really hate them that much? That he’d so readily throw this at him, at all of them? They may not be the genuine article, but damn it, that is not okay. To just have this sprung on them and—

And Peter had to live through this. All the kids. They were there when—

“Fucking hell,” he murmurs, sinking down against the wall, blinking out at the grey metal coating the entirety of the shooting range. Some sort of StarkTech designed to mute sound and catch stray bullets. Probably the best in the world. Hell, probably the most expensive to, knowing Stark.

SHIELD claims some of the best minds in the world, Stark is made of money, they’re a team of fucking _superheroes_ that save the world on a regular basis, and there’s jack shit they can do to fix this. To erase what these kids went through. To give them a childhood. To make it so that a three-year-old didn’t—

“Care for company?” Clint jolts at the voice he hadn’t expected, and it’s rare for him to be caught off-gueard. He looks up at the doorway and Sammy is there, looking fragile but certainly much more composed than Clint is right now. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay,” Clint sighs, and then pats the spot of floor next to him. Sammy eyes him warily before settling down, deceptively calm, given the situation and his age. It makes Clint honestly wonder at his parentage. But that’s a conversation for a different time. “I was just—” He has no idea how to finish that sentence. None at all. Because Sammy is a sharp kid—they all are, given their parentage—and he wouldn’t have missed the fact that Clint _emptied the damn armory._ That’s not a normal practice session. It’s barely even human. He has blisters on his hands, and considering how often he uses all these weapons on a daily basis, that’s a fucking feat.

“I know,” Sammy says calmly. He’s not judging. He’s just…he gets it. Clint really needs to stop underestimating these kids.

They sit in silence for a moment—actual, true silence, with the steel-reinforced walls surrounding them. It makes everything feel much…heavier. He takes a few deep breaths before leaning his head back against the wall and his eyes blur until everything is just a wash of grey. “I’m not a father,” he says suddenly, and he’s not quite sure why. “I never met her. Him. Fuck. I don’t even know what—”

“Her name was May,” Sammy interrupts quietly, and Clint snaps his mouth shut and tries to force himself to calm down. Zeke and Amy probably won’t even remember they had a sister. None of them even knew she existed until Peter’s little bombshell, and he’s not a father. He can’t rationalize what he’s feeling right now, other than the fact that she was three. _Three._ That’s not fucking rational. None of this is fucking rational.

“She was the eldest by about five minutes, and she knew it,” Sammy pushes on wistfully. “Always keeping the other two in line. Everyone kept forgetting she was three. We think she inherited Uncle Bruce’s smarts, but we couldn’t be sure, she was still so young…” Sammy ducks his head, and they’re both pretending they’re a lot more composed than they actually are. They’re sitting on the floor of the shooting range, for fuck’s sake. It’s cold and hard and miserable in here. No one spends time in her willingly.

“I’m sorry,” Clint says.

“You couldn’t have done anything.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Clint takes a few deep breaths, trying to figure out how to say what he needs to say. “We didn’t realize,” he starts slowly, wringing his hands together and looking at the ground. “None of us. I think a lot of us were still kind of expecting another magical portal to open up and take you back to your past lives, safe and sound, like it was all just some nightmare. We weren’t thinking about…this. And we should’ve been.”

“It’s not your fault,” Sammy argues, “You didn’t even know us, no one expected you to—”

“Kid,” he interrupts, shaking his head. “You’re at that age where you’re going to disagree with me here, and there’s nothing either of us can do about that, but you’re all still just kids. We’re the adults, you’re the kids. That’s the way it plays out.” And it’s about time they start owning up to that fact. “No matter how many universes or wormholes you throw into it. Bottom line is, we’ve done a piss-poor job of handling this up ‘til now. And for that I’m sorry.”

“Clint—”

“Look, I don’t know whose kid you were in your world. It doesn’t matter.” Clint hesitates just a moment; a moment to marvel at the irony in a bunch of kids showing up to remind all of them that they’re actually god damned adults, and it’s time they started acting a bit more like it. “I’m gonna take care of you. I’m gonna keep you—all of you—safe. You got that?”

The kid pauses, dumbstruck, before a small smile takes over his face and he ducks his head. “Yes, sir,” he says quietly, fond in a way that makes Clint’s heart clench.

“Okay,” he responds, nodding. “Okay.” He presses back against the wall, looking for stability, and Sammy presses his shoulder against Clint’s in some kind of silent show of solidarity. He can get behind that. “Alright, kid,” he claps his hands and hops to his feet, offering a hand down to help Sammy up. “Anyone ever teach you how to shoot a gun?”

Sammy takes his hand and pulls himself up, smiling at Clint in a knowing way. “Yeah, someone did.” Clint raises an eyebrow at that, but doesn’t ask, because it’s another one of those things he expects they’ll get to eventually. Like why Kennedy can't speak, or how, exactly, the perfect genetic middle between Pepper's hair color and Tasha's exists.

“Good, that means you’ve got a foundation.” He slips into teaching mode, focusing on the basics, running his mind through lists of rules and exercises. He can do this. One step at a time. “Lesson One: Knowing Your Weapon.” He scans the room, with weapons basically coating every available surface, a horrible example of how to treat your weapons that he hopes Sammy will forgive him for, just this once. Extenuating circumstances, and all that. He picks up a Glock 27, gets a good feel for the weight for a moment, and decides it's as good a place to start as any. Then he looks around again and realizes he’s pretty sure all the ammo is at the wrong end of the firing range, interspersed with tiny shreds of little paper men. “Uhh, scratch that. Lesson One: Finding some ammo in this…mess.” He looks around disdainfully.

Clint shrugs and meets Sammy’s eyes, squinted from the smile on his face.


	30. Chapter 30

Everything is different here. Claire can’t quite get over that one simple fact. Because it will look the same. It will seem the same. She will wake up in the same bed in the same room in the same tower she’s lived in for most of her life, and though the rooms are bare-boned here, it’s almost as if they’re simply painting her room, or moving things around. Her things are just in the other room, and she’ll walk around the corner and Mom will be corralling Tony into the kitchen until he consumes something solid.

But instead it’s like living in a mirror. Everything is the same, but you know there’s something off, and it’s subtle enough that you don’t notice the differences; don’t comprehend the flip, and when it hits, it just hurts that much more. It’s the little things. The way Tasha sips her coffee in the morning. The color of Pepper’s favorite pair of heels. The extra step on the way down to Tony’s workshop.

She can almost pretend, sometimes. If she tries hard enough, she can just block out the differences. But it never lasts. How can it?

Because the siege is a part of her now. When she thinks of Mom, it isn’t just the good times, before the start of the end. It’s always underlaid with the knowledge that her mother would’ve done everything to protect her. She did do everything. She gave up her life. And that is as much a part of her as the shopping trips and dry wit and Bollywood movie nights. Pepper, for all she echoes Mom, doesn’t have that past. Didn’t make that sacrifice. And while Claire is so grateful that Pepper hasn’t, because it means she’s still here to give Claire those cherished moments of self-deception, she is also constantly aware that Pepper is not her mother. She is constantly reminded that things are, in point of fact, different here, and that her world is gone. Dead. Mom is never coming back.

She can’t stand it.

She thinks this is why she takes so willingly to the idea of school. (And really, it’s only logical. They’ve been living here for a good while now, and September came and went, and by now most of the G2s are getting restless, cooped up in the tower all day. Peter seemed adamantly opposed, with good reason, but Claire thinks Tony wore him down.)

Somewhere during the siege she would’ve moved on from elementary school to middle school. So she’s starting at a new school, only familiar by proxy. It gives her a chance to get out of the tower, away from the ghosts of everything she’s lost. It grounds her in her life here and now, moving forward, instead of revolving around in the past. It lets her breathe.

She’s knows it’s not going to be so simple for some of the others. Peter’s going back to the same halls he’d been in before. He’ll be dealing with people he used to be friends with who have no idea who he is. They’re all going to have to recite their false identities so flawlessly that no one even raises an eyebrow. And when the media finally gets their shit together and realizes they exist…

But for now, this will give her something of her own. Something that doesn’t carry all that weight. She can make a life, here. Even if there will be times where it feels like she straining to hear a fading echo, still on the wrong side of the looking glass. She has more than she could’ve asked for. She has more than they had even thought to dream of after the siege. She has so much, so very much, and she is still here to see it. To have it. To live it. She’s alive. That’s enough. Or it will be. One day, when the grief is old and worn, it will be enough.


	31. Chapter 31

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's kinda short! But I've been doing some writing and it's really coming along so I'm hoping I can finish it up during vacation, when I have no internet and thus no distraction for a week (le gasp! the horror!) I PROMISE I'M GONNA FINISH THIS YOU GUYS. DON'T GIVE UP ON ME!

“Sir,” Mara inclines her head just barely as she strides into Fury’s office and stands at parade rest while she waits for him to finish the paperwork and acknowledge her. She flexes her toes in her boots; brand-new, SHIELD-issued, and the leather is still too stiff for her liking. But they hold with them the promise of much more than blisters and a couple of weights dragging her feet down.

Fury looks up. “Good morning, cadet. What do you need?”

“Weekly status repot, sir,” she responds promptly, not waiting for acknowledgement before launching right into it. “No change in frequency of occurrence regarding the tinea. Projected date of the critical point has been pushed back accordingly, though I would argue that this continue to be a top priority.”

“And the counter-initiative?”

“On the SHIELD side, sir, slow and, if I may be frank, inadequate. While the acquisition of a carcass generated quite some momentum, there’s still very little current military science can do against this type of enemy. Given our current timeline, we don’t stand a chance.”

Fury nods gravely. “And the other side?”

She hesitates. “I would have to say the same, sir.” It feels like betrayal, talking like this, but she’s only being honest. She and Fury both understand that no one is going to blame them for wanting to be kids, not soldiers, but while SHIELD and Fury would never strip them of their place here, she can’t say the same for the tinea. If they don’t figure something out, they won’t be the only ones losing their home, again.

Fury sighs and rubs his forehead with his fingers. “Has there been any progress at all?”

She doesn’t hesitate this time. “No, sir,” she says quietly, looking down. A part of this rests on her shoulders. They are intruding here, claiming this as their new home. They should be doing their part to ensure it remains their home. “I can try to expedite the process.”

Fury pauses, then nods, meeting her eyes with his one—the wrong one, Mara has to remind herself not to think. “Do what you can.”

“Yes, sir,” she nods respectfully, sensing a dismissal, but Fury halts her steps with a simple sound, and she turns back around to face him, confusion wrought on her features. She stands a little straighter and her boots feel steady on the ground. “Sir?”

“At ease,” he says, and she hesitates—this is very unlike them. Since she’s arrived at SHIELD, chosen to stay with Fury and to attend the SHIELD-sponsored military academy rather than the public school with the rest of the G2s, it has always been under a strict soldier-commander protocol. She lives in the sparse, long-term SHIELD rooms, she works part-time under Fury managing the tinea containment, and she is content with this. She is a soldier at heart, not just when the occasion calls for it, as it did for Peter, for Claire, for Sammy. This is…unexpected.

She forces a roll of her shoulders and takes a seat when Fury nods to the chair. Her skin tingles with anticipation, and she finds she rather dislikes this…break from protocol.

“How are you?”

“Sir?”

Fury’s jaw twitches in impatience, or perhaps amusement. “I asked how you are. How you’re doing. With SHIELD, with the academy, with this universe.”

She’s struck dumb for a moment, because this sounds like— Fury is acting as if— But of course, there’s that difference. There always is. She recognizes that this man is not her father, and she is content with that. She can compartmentalize. But this is Fury, reaching out in a way he wouldn’t to any other soldier. This is Fury recognizing that there is a connection between them, whether they like it or not, and he’s choosing to honor that in the least-intruding sense possible.

It’s a thoughtful gesture.

“Good, s— Good.” She waits to see if Fury takes issue with her dropping the “sir”, but he doesn’t. He just calmly gazes at her over the peak of his hands. Mara is almost surprised to find that there is no blame there—no ill-will toward her or her kind, the others that have so ungraciously fallen into the fray of this universe with her. It’s a relief, though not a necessary one. She would have dealt regardless of Fury’s opinion, but it’s nice to know that she has this in her favor, at the very least.

She chances a small, professional smile—there is a certain level of familiarity that is lost forever, but that is more than enough heartwarming gestures for one day. She settles in, looks at the man who would be her father, and answers his questions in kind.


	32. Chapter 32

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not even going to try to defend myself about how long it's been since I've updated. Sorry.

Peter doesn’t remember the first week of school. He was a bit too preoccupied freaking out about the fact that Kennedy was somewhere across the city right now, probably struggling just to fit in with a bunch of kids who don’t understand why she can’t talk, can’t even use proper sign language, let alone her special variation, and he doesn’t have her within his sight, within a reasonable distance in case something happens. In case the world ends again.

He’s aware that it’s not the most average thing for someone to be thinking about in a High School chemistry class. But as much as Peter understands acclimation, in theory, he feels like there are ants crawling all over his skin. He doesn’t belong here. The people he used to know stare at him now because he’s the new kid, and he’s too worried about Kennedy and the others that are starting school today to even consider chemical reactions or 18th century poetry.

It isn’t until they’ve all been going to school for two weeks before he realizes that maybe this really is okay. Kennedy loves it—loves learning, and doesn’t seem too preoccupied with the fact that she’s different. It’s a good feeling, being able to see the kids being kids again. He starts concentrating on himself again—a strange feeling—and he uses some of the money that Tony throws at him to buy himself a camera. He had been thinking about joining the journalism team, back home, before everything went to hell. He’d never gotten the chance then, but this is supposed to be about new beginnings, right?

The thing he buys is old and clunky and Tony calls it “an insult to technology everywhere”, but Peter is very actively not giving a shit about anything Tony has to say right now, and he loves the thing. It’s easier to hide when there’s a lens between you and the rest of the world, and while Peter tries to pretend he isn’t hiding, he is. It’s not really too much trouble remembering a false identity and backstory if no one asks you in the first place.

Unfortunately, there’s a downside to walking around with a camera hanging around your neck all the time.

“Hey Camera guy, come on. Get a picture of this.” It’s Flash. Well, it’s not Flash, but it might as well be. Peter doubts that all that much has changed between the universes when Flash only has one brain cell bouncing around in his hat-encased head. He thinks even the multiverse would have trouble coming up with more than a carbon copy for this kid.

Flash, ever the charmer, has a kid—not-Gordon—shoved down into a plate full of food. Half the school is crowded around, watching everything unfold with vaguely bemused expressions on their faces. He honestly questions why it is he’s wasting his time here when he could be working on a way to save the world from inter-dimensional cockroaches.

“No, I’m not gonna take a picture of it. Put him down, man. Put him down.” Simple pleading. Peter should really know better than to expect that to work on Flash. “Gordon, don’t eat it.” If the kid seems surprised that Peter knows his name, he doesn’t show it, though maybe it’s more the mashed potatoes that don’t let him show it, but…details.

“Take the picture, Camera Guy.” Of all the nicknames in all the world...

“Put him down, Flash,” he asks, sternly, and sees a mix between surprise and glee that The New Kid knows his name. Peter’s sure there must be some sort of advantage to knowing who everyone is without them knowing you. He just hasn’t figured it out yet.

“Take the picture,” Flash demands. His face is all pinched and red, and Peter can see his fingers tightening around Gordon.

An idea hits him, and yes, okay, this would be the advantage right here. “Put him down, Eugene!” Bingo. Flash, born Eugene but so dreadfully embarrassed that he never once uttered that name within these four walls (what can Peter say, he’s got the Stark computers at his disposal, they can hack into anything), does not look happy. Actually, he seems just angry enough to forget about poor Gordon for a moment and— Oh, shit. “Hey, man.”

He hardly gets the words out before there’s a fist connecting with his face, and Peter hits the ground, dizzy and disoriented.

“Come on. Get up, kid!” Flash shouts, and really, the guy must have major daddy issues or _something_ , because no one is this angry all the time. Stupidly, Peter listens to him and stands up, only to get a fist in the gut, and he’s back on the floor, and his head is spinning, and there’s shouting, and—

“Get up! Come on. Come on. Get up!”

Pain bursts in his stomach and he can’t breathe, can’t think, his eyes are shut tightly and he doesn’t know where he is, doesn’t know where Kennedy is, doesn’t know where any of them are and he swears he can hear the tinea screeching. He’s got to move, he’s got to fight. Kennedy needs him, they all need him and he is not going to die at the hands of some fucking overgrown cockroach.

His body moves of its own accord, a swipe of his leg out until it connects, and then he’s rolling and striking out viciously, connecting with anything he can, using every ounce of strength and hoping like hell he has time to get away, that he can find some sort of weapon—a gun, a knife, a pen, anything to kill this thing, or injure it enough to gather the others and get back to base, secure it, ready the next level up if they need to, fight and fight and fight until they can’t anymore, until—

There’s a shuddering breath, not Peter’s own, definitely not anything he recognizes, but coming from his target, from the tinea that—no. Not tinea. Definitely human. A guy. Flash.

Shit.


	33. Chapter 33

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah so I made a thing.

 

Tony is the media darling.

Well, no, Steve is the media darling, but Steve is also a pretentious dick with some major fucking issues about this particular subject, which means he really ought to be locked in the basement of the tower with an army of punching bags until he cools down. Natasha is terrifying, half New York still holds a grudge against Bruce for breaking Harlem, Clint’s best explanation would probably be “caw caw, motherfuckers”, and Thor…is Thor.

Which leaves Tony to deal with the zombie hordes on his own. Assholes.

Really, it’s a shock that the media is so slow on the uptake. They’ve hardly been careful about keeping this under wraps. And yet, all it takes is a little schoolyard brawl (which, despite the school’s insistence on some sort of therapy and the obvious traits of PTSD screaming at him, as well as his status as a faux-parent, Tony thinks is awesome) and they’ve suddenly got pictures ranging back weeks splashed all over the gossip rags. Really, if Tony had any sense of social morality, he would remove the right of the public to own camera phones.

Not only does he have the schools calling—both about Peter’s ability to kick some hardcore ass, but about all the media camped outside, as if he can do anything about that—but he’s also got about a billion different so-called “news” reporters clamoring for an exclusive. Which he is never going to offer, because he is Tony Fucking Stark and he does things on his own terms. And Fury is keeping Tony on a tight leash, constantly popping by with an unpleasant scowl on his face to lament the fact that Steve has turned into a Grade A dick and no one else but Tony can handle this kind of Media Apocalypse Now bullshit.

Then there’s the issue of the kids, who are A) not handling this well and B) really not handling this well. Fury’s plan, which consisted of fake identities and backstories that ultimately led to all the children being, in some way or another, adopted by Earth’s mightiest heroes, fell apart in the most spectacular fashion, which Tony could have told him it would do if he’d been so thoughtful as to listen to him. While the public still has no idea there are alternate-universe kids on the loose (hide your kids! hide your wife!) or even alternate universes at all, they’re perceptive enough to know that SHIELD’s attempt to portray the Avengers as philanthropic saviors of an entire orphanage (or whatever the bogus story was, Tony doesn’t know or care, it crumbled in minutes) was a front. A very poorly thought-out front which basically neglects the fact that while Tony donates to charities regularly, he does so because he has a lot of money and not a lot of use for all of it, and because Pepper controls his bank account and likes baby cheetahs or whatever.

That leaves Steve, with his complete inability to distinguish between an ATM and a port-o-potty, Bruce, whose tendency to crush entire forests doesn’t sit well with PETA, Clint and Natasha, who are owned and paid for by SHIELD, and Thor, who isn’t even from Earth and thinks that philanthropy is some type of exotic bird.

The point is, the Avengers are not the type to suddenly get all sentimental and adopt the fucking Lost Boys. So it’s really not that hard to figure out that the public is going to see right through that shit. The only reason there are kids living with the Avengers is because they are one, a security risk, and two, related, in some roundabout way, to at least one of them. Tony knows this, the team knows this, and the public knows the general gist of this.

Why SHIELD ever thought that some bullshit, mushy lie concocted by a SHIELD PR manager that probably writes bad fan fiction in her spare time would ever hold up, Tony doesn’t claim to know. All he knows is that people like feeling like they’re in on some big secret, and it’s Tony’s job right now to appease the people in such a way that won’t get Child Protective Services knocking down their door.

He calls a press conference. Because hey, it’s worked in the past, it’ll work again, it’s a simple line of logic that everyone should be able to follow except, of course, Pepper.

“Tony, need I remind you that the last press conference you called—”

“Resulted in me getting my way and the world not ending, yes, remind me why that’s a bad thing again?” He’s already marching toward the conference room. Pepper is not going to stop him.

“Because exploiting these kids because you’ve got a god damn messiah complex—”

“Aww, Pep, I had no idea you thought about me that way,” he says, mock-sweetly, and Pepper practically _growls._

“Tony, I swear to God, if you ruin these kids’ lives, so help me God, not even your shiny metal dick-size compensation will save you.”

And, for the record, Pepper as a mother? Fucking terrifying. If Tony weren’t currently walking into a room full of people with cameras, he would probably be pissing himself. Luckily, he is a master of timing, and he walks into the room just as she finishes threatening him with bodily harm, and as he walks past the white-light flashes that probably make him look like a devilishly handsome ghost, the sting of Pepper’s nails where they dug into his wrist is still sharp. It serves as a reminder just who it is he’s doing this for.

Not Pepper, or Fury, or SHIELD, or Captain Asshole, or Howard, or the media sharks, or the public, or even the team. No. He’s doing this for the kids. Because he’ll be damned if anyone is going to touch them, try to take them away from the home they’re still trying to rebuild, from the closest thing to their parents they’re probably ever going to find. The public, for once, will not get a say in this. Nor will SHIELD, or the State, or the fucking President of the United States, for all he cares. He will not see any of them—will not see Kennedy—torn asunder by people who don’t know any better. Not again. Not in the wake of her dying world.

This is her heritage. He’ll protect it with everything he has.


	34. Chapter 34

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the long wait! School's started back up, and I'm the idiot that thought taking 3 studio art classes on top of 3 other classes was a good idea, AND I work a part-time job. Updates will probably be coming a bit slower unless things calm down any, but I promise you I'm still very much invested in this fic! :)

“The truth, Stark? What the _hell_ possessed you to tell them the truth?” Nick Fury is angry. Unreasonably so, if you ask Steve, though these days, no one does.

“Lying 101, Fury,” Stark snipes back, “The truth has its merits. Especially when the alternative is telling the public with a straight face that we got ourselves ten little orphan Annies because the Hulk wanted a playmate.”

“Don’t get cute with me,” Fury growls.

“Oh, was I? Sorry, cute is my default setting, I can change it to ‘adorable’ if you’d like.” Stark shoots Fury a facetious grin and leans back in his chair, crossing his arms and staring Fury down over the conference room table. It’s steel-reinforced, like everything else at SHIELD. Steve figures if there’s anywhere in the world where a business meeting could go so horribly awry as to require using the conference table as a bullet-shield, it would be here.

“The children—”

“Would you _stop_ with this ‘children’ bullshit?” Peter snaps. He’s been a lot more outspoken since the media got ahold of this news, and Steve knows it’s because he blames himself for the leak. It was bound to get out sometime, though. From what Steve’s heard of the situation at the school, it couldn’t have been prevented. Steve doesn’t like bullies, and he doesn’t blame Peter for acting as he had, though perhaps he had an unfair advantage in the physical sense. “We’re not a damn charity case.”

Fury’s lip twitches at Peter’s impudence. “Would you prefer ‘brat’?”

“G2s is just fine, thanks,” Peter replies, unfazed. Steve admires him his ability to stand on level footing with Fury. He bulldozed his way into any official meetings regarding the kids, and he’s appointed himself ambassador. It’s certainly better than watching Stark and Fury squabble endlessly without resolution.

“The public wants your head on a pike, Stark,” Fury pushes onward, referring to the blatant outrage a vast majority of people have had about the presence of ‘aliens’ attending school with their children. Luckily, only Peter’s identity has been compromised, and the rest of the kids continue to attend school with relatively little public recognition.

“The public can shove that pike up their ass. They’re here, they’re from another cosmic sphere, get used to it and all that jazz. Unless the public’s opinion on genocide has done a 180 recently—which I wouldn’t exclude from the realm of possibility. Rush Limbaugh is considered ‘the public’ these days, though whether or not he’s human is still a hot topic. Point is, the kids aren’t going anywhere.”

Peter shoots Stark a look, to which Stark rolls his eyes and says “G2s, kids, puppies, what have you. I’d say put it to a vote but _none of you are legal_ so can it, the grown-ups are having a talk.”

Peter stands abruptly and retorts “Sorry, Stark, remind me at what point you grew up? I must have missed it.” He stalks out of the room with a kind of easy grace that dulls down the fact that he’s essentially throwing a tantrum, leaving Stark and Fury mostly speechless, an impressive feat. It doesn’t last long, though, and soon they’re back to bickering.

“What, did your mad scientists mix up some retcon for you? I don’t think they have a Guinness world record for slipping the entire planet roofies, you could really make a name for yourself with that!”

This isn’t going anywhere, and Steve’s not the only one who seems to realize this. Slowly, each of the Avengers slips away, leaving Fury and Stark to their own devices for awhile. Steve is the last out, though not by his own choosing. If Stark and Fury could be bothered to pull their heads out of their asses for a damn moment, they might realize that Peter is really not okay. Steve can’t be the only one that’s noticed Peter’s PTSD shining through in the extraneous details from his ‘fight’ at school. No normal 16-year-old can send a guy twice his size to the ground with a concussion in five seconds flat.

Steve is honestly surprised it’s taken the media this long. Maybe it’s because Steve grew up in a war culture, and spent so long surrounded by soldiers, but whenever he looks at any of the kids, he doesn’t see kids. He sees soldiers; pawns; weapons. Kennedy’s sharp mind, fostered by the only man in existence capable of creating missiles smarter than most enemies—retired or not. Sammy’s extensive, mostly unnoticed hand-to-hand combat skills. The simple tasks the twins are able to carry out are stunning for children their age, if not bordering superhuman. Peter’s cold, calculating leadership, carefully concealed beneath a layer of familial love and a more recent veneer of sarcasm and wit.

They are not children. They are strategists, they are soldiers, and they are dangerous.


	35. Chapter 35

Kennedy knows that Peter is keeping things from her. Sometimes, Peter gets the idea that she’s like any other six-year-old, with the mental acuity of a common housefly. It seems like this is one of those times, because as he’s telling her about his lab project, he’s acting as if she isn’t noticing the parts he’s leaving out. He acts as if she can’t figure out, from the science itself, what exactly he’s making.

She gets the feeling that Peter’s been trying, for weeks, to make this work on his own. He hasn’t had much luck. And that’s because Peter has always been better with the theoretical side of science, the biology and the compounds and the chemistry. That’s his strong suit. Kennedy is better with the physical side of science. Physics, mechanics, building things—like Dad.

That’s why Peter needs her. He’ll design the chemical side, the compounds, sealants, combining chemicals until he gets the right mix. Kennedy will put it to use—in this case, she’s going to be building weapons. Peter tried to talk around it, but he didn’t do a very good job. She’s building guns. Projectiles. Bombs.

Dad won’t—wouldn’t—like it, but she hacked his old Stark Industries files last year, and it had probably saved all of their lives when the tinea came. She doesn’t regret it, and she won’t hesitate to do it again. She just hopes that Peter has a plan to keep this all secret, because Kennedy isn’t very good at plans and things. She likes to build stuff. Peter takes care of everything else.

She thinks Fury might disapprove of a group of children building weapons. Dad, too, even if he was about her age when he started building bombs and guns and robots that would fire bombs and guns.

She doesn’t ask why Peter needs these things. The tinea aren’t in this universe. There are probably other bad guys, and lots of them, but the Avengers are pretty good at fighting those and Peter is only sixteen, he shouldn’t be doing this superhero stuff. They’re supposed to be safe here. She wants to be safe here.

Maybe that’s why she doesn’t ask.


	36. Chapter 36

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I AM SO SORRY I'M SHIT AT UPDATING. I promise this isn't abandoned. I just have to make the final leap into the last bit of the story and then tie up all my plotlines. It might be a while between chapters but once I finish it I'll try to post at least a chapter a week. Again, SORRY.

The thing is, sometimes Claire just doesn’t know what to do with herself.

Pepper takes her shoe shopping and watches Buffy with her in the middle of the afternoon in their pajamas. Natasha spars with her and occasionally one of them says something funny and they smile and laugh for a few moments before Natasha remembers her tactical training and things get awkward. The rest of the Avengers seem to think she’s a grown woman trapped inside a 12-year-old’s body, which is simultaneously flattering and incredibly annoying.

The others are mostly children.

It’s why, when the nightmares wake her at nearly 3 in the morning, she shivers and goes to find Peter in his lab. It’s really messed up, but she kind of thinks of him as a father figure. He took care of them. Granted, if they went by family dynamics then she’d be the mother, because Mara is scary and possibly a robot, and Sammy could theoretically be the second dad but he was always more of a big brother figure. Anyway, now they have actual not-parents to deal with. They don’t need to make things any more complicated by thinking about themselves as a multi-generational family, as well.

But one way or another, she winds up in Peter’s lab, stepping carefully through a minefield of technological equipment she doesn’t understand. Peter is passed out on a desk. His mouth is open and drooling and he looks so peaceful and relaxed that she doesn’t quite know who he is. She hasn’t seen him like this since before the siege.

“Peter,” she says quietly. There’s no response. She steps a bit closer and runs her fingers through his hair, gently. She thinks, deep down, Mom was always a little disappointed that Claire always saw Peter as a brother more than a potential husband. Even if that weren’t the grossest thing ever, it would probably be awkward since Mom and Tony used to date. Then again, Kennedy’s conception was kind of really awkward like _all the time,_ for all nine months, and that happened.

“Peter,” she tries again, shaking him a little by the shoulder. Peter wakes up suddenly and violently, lashing out so quickly that Claire barely has time to defend herself. But instinct kicks in, and she’s got Peter pinned to the floor beneath her in seconds, both of them trying to catch their breath. Peter wakes up a little more thoroughly this time and gets his bearings.

“Holy shit, since when can you freaking _pin me?”_

Claire grins evilly. “Nat’s been teaching me a few things,” she says easily and helps Peter up. “Sorry to wake you. I figure you should sleep in a real bed.”

“Yeah, thanks,” he says, rubbing at the back of his head. Claire hopes he didn’t hit it too hard. She wasn’t trying to hurt him.

“What are you working on?” Her eyes wander over to the desk littered with paper and beakers and contraptions. It’s all foreign to her.

Peter shifts from foot-to-foot and says “pet project, I guess.” He shrugs. “What time is it?”

“About three.”

He raises a curious eyebrow and looks at her. Claire bites her bottom lip, squirming, and then says “I couldn’t sleep.” Peter doesn’t let her off that easy, though, and waits for more. “Nightmares.”

He nods and doesn’t say anything else. Claire is pretty sure he’s the only one that gets it enough to leave it be. There’s no easy fix for this. He sits back down in his chair and she hops up onto his desk, swinging her legs. “What about you?” She asks. Talking always helps her on nights like this. “Why are you up so late?”

Peter glances away and then forces a shrug. “Working.”

“High school is that hard, huh?” She smiles and taps his shin with the tip of her foot. “Should I be worried?”

“You?” He teases, “what are you talking about? You’re like a genius, a prodigy, a–” he flaps his hand around, the same way his dad used to. Claire quirks an eyebrow at him and grins. “No, this is…” he gestures to the papers and beakers and science stuff cluttering his entire lab, “other stuff. Not school.” She wonders about that, but doesn’t ask. It’s not her business and besides, it’s three in the morning.

“You should try to get back to sleep,” he admonishes gently. His eyes are drooping, and he has to stifle a yawn right after he says it.

“You too.” Peter looks hesitant. “Come on.” She hops off his desk and take a few steps back, holding her hand out.

“I should really–”

“You should really get some sleep.” She uses her mom-voice, the one that got her all those lollipops when she was a kid, and the one that kept the kids in line after the siege.

“I will. I just need to finish this. Then I’ll sleep.”

She’s not stupid. She’s not oblivious. There’s something going on here, in this universe. That’s why Mara has been running all over the place with SHIELD. It’s why Peter’s been working himself to exhaustion in his lab. Something is wrong. And from that, it’s not really that hard to figure out what it is. After all they’ve been through, the one thing that could push them this far, frighten them so much.

“They’re back, aren’t they?” She can hardly hear her own voice, it’s so quiet. “They’re coming back.”

Peter draws back, eyes widening, and then he catches her eye. He nods.

Pure, cold dread drips down her spine. Her fingers clench into her palms. They’re coming.

They’re coming.


	37. Chapter 37

Kennedy knows that sometimes it’s hard for people to understand her. Before she started going to school, Dads had to go in and talk to her teachers because otherwise they would be confused and angry and wouldn’t know what to do. One time, Kennedy had a substitute teacher. She was teaching the rest of the class addition and Kennedy was drawing a robotic kitten. She was going to go home and have Dad help her build it. But the teacher got angry that she wasn’t paying attention and took away her drawing and told her to do math. She finished early because she knew how to add 2+8 and even big numbers like 1039+29304 and she could do subtraction and multiplication and division and algebra.

Her teacher didn’t like it. She spent a lot of time looking at Kennedy funny and wouldn’t give her pencil and paper back. It was a bad day.

But Kennedy is “precocious”. She doesn’t know what that means but she knows that people say she is, even Peter, so it must be true. And now that they’re here in the new world and they have their new parents and they’re going to new schools, she has to be patient. So she’s patient with her teacher, and she’s patient with her classmates, and they think she’s stupid because she doesn’t talk but that’s okay, she forgives them.

She even gets to go to special lessons with Ms. Mandy when her teacher sees her using sign language, and Ms. Mandy is teaching her the right way to do sign language, and she loves it because there are words for everything, even things she never knew how to say before.

And she has a friend. His name is Ryan and he doesn’t speak much either because he’s shy. He teaches Kennedy the rules to all the games the other kids play on the playground, and she teaches him how the small remote control cars work. His Dad is dead, too. He doesn’t look at her weird when she says she had two dads, or that she used to live in the same universe as them but then they had to come here and now her dads are different.

She’s walking to the gates of the school with Ryan so they can go home and she knows when she gets outside that things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be. There are lots of people around the entrance, and lots of camera flashes, and people are running over to them as soon as they see her. She’s not stupid, she knows what journalists look like and what they do, but she’s also about half as tall as them, and Dads were always really good about keeping them away back home. But it’s just her and Ryan, and Ryan looks really scared, and they’re all really close to her and really loud. She grips onto Ryan’s hand because she doesn’t want to lose him, has to protect him, but his tiny fingers slip away from hers and she can hardly see through all the lights. She can’t even tell if they’re asking her questions or just shouting.

And she’s scared. After the tinea, she didn’t think anything here in this universe would scare her, but she’s so scared, and she’s too small to do anything about it, and her eyes get all blurry. She can’t even call out to anyone for help. She can’t answer their questions. She wants Peter. She wants her Dads. She wants to be safe and happy and together again and she knows that some of these things can’t happen, because she’s one of the smartest kids in the world right now, but she’s still six and right now, all she wants is her family.

She stumbles and shuts her eyes tight, covering her ears, like maybe they’ll all just go away if she wishes hard enough. Like in those stupid Disney princess movies, where all their dreams come true. She wants to go home and tell Peter about her new friend and she wants to build robots with Dad and she wants to tell Papa how to work the toaster again because he still forgets no matter how many times she tells him.

There’s a big, warm hand closing around her arm and pulling her away, strong arms scooping her up and carrying her into a car, and she buries her face in the person’s shirt and wonders if this world’s Papa needs someone to teach him how to use the toaster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, it's short. I'm horrible. I'll post another short one soon. But summer is here and I don't have a job (yet) so I'm hoping I can wrap this fic up in the next few months. Fingers crossed.
> 
> This is NOT abandoned. I want to make that clear. I WILL finish this. Even if it takes a little while.
> 
> Thanks for putting up with me.


	38. Chapter 38

“I’m going to kill them all. Pepper, clear my schedule. Is it illegal to kill reporters? I thought there was a loophole somewhere. Or is that just the lawyers? You know what, I don’t care. JARVIS, I need you to find me some addresses—”

“Tony,” she says. Tony stops abruptly, poking at a piece of machinery on one of his workbenches, turned away from her. It’s tempting to throw her hands up and tell everyone she played no part in this, of course she had no idea Tony would take the suit and massacre a few dozen people, maybe wreck a few buildings. And could you really blame him? But Tony didn’t make her the head of Stark Industries because of her looks—or, not just because of her looks. He seemed to recognize that she had a business-conscious mind and some idea of logic in her, and it’s always been her job to tame his crazier self.

“Oh come on, Pep, at least let me hurt them. Possibly some maiming. They don’t need both arms to hold a microphone.”

“Tony, no.”

“They went after Kennedy!” Tony turns on his heel and marches forward a few steps before stopping abruptly. He resumes his angry pacing. Pepper purses her lips in an attempt to keep herself from giving him her undying support. “She’s six and she can’t respond or defend herself and she was at school and need I remind you that she’s six?”

“I understand that, but Tony—”

“Don’t you ‘but Tony’ me. What if it had been Claire?” Pepper shivers at the thought, her breath freezing in her lungs and the color draining from her face. She couldn’t imagine… “And who’s to say it won’t be? They’ve already found Peter and Kennedy. I think between the dozens of them they might be able to round up enough brain cells to devise where Claire is, or the other kids, and what’s to stop them from—”

She takes a step forward, heel stomping sharply on the concrete floor. “Tony, stop it. Yes, they’re horrible, and yes, they should be stopped. But you’re not going to kill them. We need to go about this calmly and logical—”

“JARVIS, call Fury.” Tony doesn’t even glance in her direction. He keeps pacing a rut in the ground. Pepper fully expects chunks of metal to start flying off his workbenches, breaking apart on the floor, destroyed by his anger. She thinks, if Tony were to start throwing things, she might have to join in. But one of her most defining qualities is her ability to keep a lid on things and approach everything objectively. She’s determined to do that now, if only to ensure those reporters get everything that’s coming to them and then some. She will push them until they shake in fear at the full power of Howard Stark’s legacy. She just has to keep said legacy out of jail and out of the hospital, and preferably out of the suit until she’s entirely certain he won’t fly off and “accidentally” drop people in the middle of an impromptu joyride at 10,000 feet, sans parachute.

“JARVIS, end call.”

Tony shoots a glare at her, utterly betrayed, but she waits him out. “We have to play this smart. Keeping our image—”

“Image? Stop, stop. Just stop. You’re only making this worse for yourse—”

“Making the media think we’re temperamental, violent, traitors with superhuman abilities is only going to make things worse for them, Tony. I will contact Director Fury about this, and we will be following his orders. Understood?”

Tony crosses his arms and refuses to look at her. She taps her foot impatiently. “Understood?”

When that elicits no response, she sighs. “You’re one of the smartest, richest, most powerful men alive. Since when do you need a weaponized suit to destroy lives and topple companies?” A wicked smile starts to spread over Tony’s face. “Not that I am condoning such actions, Mr. Stark, I hope you understand. But if you were to use your aforementioned resources in such a way as to implicate neither yourself nor Stark Industries, then how am I to be the wiser?”

Tony grabs her face and pulls her into a swift, shocking kiss before saying “Has anyone ever told you you’d make a great evil mastermind? You know, I hear Loki might be vacating his spot, retiring, something about an unnatural attachment to his wayward son, I’m sure I could pull a few strings and put you next in line. Penthouse office, lots of minions, great benefits.”

“I’ll consider it,” she says wryly, turning on her heel and walking out of the workshop. She has a few calls to make herself. Tony Stark may be the prodigal son, but CEO of Stark Industries is nothing to sneeze at.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> LOL sorry I'm a piece of shit here's a tiny update to prove I'm not dead even if I am awful.


	39. Chapter 39

Steve didn’t notice anything changing until it had already happened, and he was leaning against an empty table in Peter’s lab, watching him work, thinking _there’s no way this kid is bad news._ It was the small things the kids did, he thinks. Mac trying to teach Mo how to say “Asgard” one foggy afternoon two weeks ago. Sammy and Clint arguing about what the coolest superpower is. Natasha’s long hours in the gym with Claire, teaching her how to defend herself with a tough-love approach, and Claire’s pure determination. They hadn’t even noticed Steve was there. Kennedy finished building a tiny robot that goes around tying shoes, and after a couple of mishaps where it tied people’s shoes together, it got it right enough times that the younger kids started watching it to teach themselves.

He hasn’t been blind to the changes in their team, either. As much as Director Fury told them to exercise caution, he seems quietly taken with Mara, and he’s been more lenient on the small things since her arrival. The kids smoothed over the remnants of pain between Clint and Natasha, and now instead of silently mourning alone, they’re back to spending time together, forging a friendship in the ruins of their relationship, shooting witty barbs over the sound of the television. Thor and Jane are smitten—there’s no other way to put it. Though of all of them, they seemed to have the simplest situation. Whether it’s Pepper’s presence or Kennedy’s or both, Tony has stopped drinking himself into a stupor and going for joyrides in the suit. He’s stopped self-destructing, and even though he never leaves the room without first slyly insulting Steve, he’s not as vicious. Bruce has started trusting himself.

In his panic to protect his team, to resist more change when so much had already changed around him, he failed to see the positive outcomes this situation could have, and kept waiting for the other shoe to fall. Just like it did when they pulled him from the ice. Decades of change had been forced upon him, and he’d only just started adjusting when he realized that all the decades had produced was more inventive ways to wage war. New York City had fallen to pieces around him, and there was a part of him that couldn’t help but think it was because everything had changed in all the wrong ways.

But he’d been so quick to blame these kids for a fate that had yet to come, when all they’d been trying to do was find a home. He couldn’t help but think that Tony was right about him. That the rest of the team’s coldness had been his own doing. They were moving on without him, and he couldn’t blame them. He couldn’t keep expecting people to wait for him. Peggy didn’t. His team didn’t. He couldn’t expect that of them.

But it had taken him so long to realize this that by the time he had, about the only one willing to speak to him without side-eying him was Peter.

So now he stands here, for maybe the third time, leaning on a cluttered desk and watching Peter work on things far beyond his understanding.

“Maybe if I adjust the left calibration, then it’ll affect the calibration on the right and even out. Worth a try, right?”

Steve hums noncommittally. Peter doesn’t expect real answers from him, but he’s happy to serve as a sounding board. Tony would sometimes do the same to people around him, when he was absorbed in his work. Steve thinks it’s part of the reason he built JARVIS—a way to express his thoughts when they were threatening to start leaking from his ears. When Steve had still been allowed within a hundred mile radius of Tony, Steve had served as a type of sounding board. Though at the time, he hadn’t known it.

“Alright, let’s—ah, shit!” Peter pulls back, dripping in what Steve hopes is water with food coloring. “I don’t know what I expected. Use canisters, she said. It’ll be more compact, she said. Kennedy, I swear to God if you did this just to see my hands turn purple…”

Steve laughed quietly. He’d been an only child, but he’d seen the way other had interacted with their siblings, and he envied that lifelong connection with someone. He’d hoped to find that in the team, though now, with how he’s been acting…

“Man, she gets me every time. Unfair advantage with the sign. No tone of voice to give her away. She’s such a little charlatan…”

Steve finds himself grinning uncontrollably when Peter lets out an exasperated sigh, looking at his bright purple hands, shirt, and jeans, and then shrugs and turns toward Steve. There’s a streak of purple on the side of his face, and one smudge on his forehead, and even though Peter’s been scrubbing at his hands, the purple stain hasn’t relented. Steve feels the corners of his mouth tugging and then Peter frowns at him, asks “What?” and Steve openly chuckles.

Peter, cluing in to his predicament, starts muttering “I’m gonna kick her scrawny little ass, I swear. If this doesn’t come off by Monday—oh god, Gwen. I’m going to have to face Gwen looking like Barney.”

Steve is in stitches, curled over and clutching at his stomach, and Peter just keeps on ranting, playfully poking fun at his little sister, rubbing at his face and making it that much worse. Peter finally finds a damp towel lying around on one of the tables, hopefully damp with water and not rocket fuel—though he wouldn’t be surprised—and he starts scrubbing at his hands and face. It’s working, for the most part.

Steve catches his breath enough to point and say “You’ve got a little…um…” and then Peter glances at him, coated in purple, and Steve is lost in chuckles again. Peter wipes at his face, sighs, throws the towel down over a bit of metal machinery lying on the corner of the table, and leans against the opposite table. His fingers curl around the edge of the desk, and Steve’s willing to bet he’ll have purple finger-stains there.

“Thanks,” Peter says with a grin.

Something warm tugs at Steve’s chest, and he doesn’t quite know what it is. It’s happened around some of the kids, a few times. It’s different from the pull he feels when he was around Tony, back when they were still dancing around each other in Tony’s labs, headed toward something Steve still doesn’t know how to define. This is different. It’s…protective, and a little proud, and the closest Steve can come to comparing it is how he feels about their team.

Steve realizes then that he might have been too quick to judge. That he was assuming the twist in his gut was distrust and suspicion, when maybe it was just fear of change. His team is his family. He will—he _does—_ protect them with his life, and when something threatened to change that, vault him into unfamiliar territory _again,_ he went into a tailspin. He was so busy falling that he never stopped to think maybe this change didn’t mean the destruction of his family, it meant the expansion of it. This is what Steve’s been missing this whole time, while the rest of his team has figured it out.

He has a lot of catching up to do, he thinks, as Peter starts cheerfully explaining one of his projects, hands moving about him like Tony’s had—still do, probably—wearing a wry smile that’s all his own. Steve wonders when he started knowing Peter well enough to tell which of his smiles are taken from the other Avengers, and which are his own.

It’s a start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ;-; I'm so sorry here have this as my apology for forgetting this site existed.
> 
> BUT with summer rolling around (and the blackhawks out of the playoffs /cries), I tend to write more, and I don't want to start any new projects until I finish all the ongoing ones, so maybe there's hope for me yet.
> 
> I'm a little stuck on the Steve/Tony relationship because LOL I really backed myself into a corner but I will work it out I promise. But if anyone has ideas for how I get to a happy ending for those two from here I'd love to hear it. :)

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Title taken from the Linkin Park song [of the same name](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNv5g_9EliQ).
> 
> WARNINGS:  
> • Alternate universe major character death.  
> • References/depictions of PTSD in both adults and children.  
> • Phil Coulson is still dead. =(
> 
> UPDATES:  
> Currently working on Chapter 41.  
> Total series word count: ~63k.


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